He regularly collaborates with faculty and students in other colleges at University of Cincinnati, as well as civic groups, including the FIRST Lego League, the Ohio Academy of Science, and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (Chapter 21).
He noted the importance of combining image processing algorithms with manipulators and controller to build intelligent robots,[4] especially in automatic target recognition.
He has founded and has co-chaired an annual conference on Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision for the past 25 years to provide a forum for new innovations in this field.
He also founded the UC Robot Team that has participated in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition for the past 15 years[6] and the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 and 2007.
In 2006, Ernest L. Hall won the Grand Prize in the "Made in Express" contest sponsored by Microsoft.
[9] His entry for the contest was an all-terrain self-maneuverable robot developed using Microsoft Visual Studio Express.