Dr. Bar-Cohen is a physicist specializing in electroactive materials/mechanisms and ultrasonic NDE. He has extensive experience initiating and leading multidisciplinary tasks while partnering with experts from the academia, industry and other R&D organizations. His efforts and leadership led to the development of novel ultrasonic drill, multi-radiation ferrosource, piezoelectric motors, piezoelectric pump, ultrasonic NDE methods, real time sensing, geophysical probing techniques, haptic interfaces, electroactive polymer actuators (artificial muscles), and high power ultrasonic techniques.

His initiatives and proactive efforts in the area of Electroactive Polymers led to the SPIEs EAPAD annual conference (which he has been chairing since 1999), the WW-EAP Newsletter, and the WW-EAP Webhub. In an effort to promote rapid advances in the development of EAP, Dr. Bar-Cohen posed in 1999 a challenge to the worldwide research and engineering community to develop a robotic arm that is actuated by artificial muscles to win an armwrestling match against a human opponent. He held the first armwrestling match between EAP actuated robot and human on March 7, 2005 as part of the SPIE Annual International EAPAD Conference.

He made significant contributions to NDE of composites and bonded solids as well as aging aircraft structures. He led the development of a crawler, known as MACS (Multifunctional Automated Crawling System) that can serve as a robotic platform for PC board base instruments. As a follow-on effort, he edited and co-authored an ASNT book on the subject of robotics for NDE, which was issued in April 2000. Other contributions include real time monitoring of composites curing, broadband transducers, a LLW device for nondestructive determination of elastic properties of composites and a catheter-based acoustic microscope.