He got his doctorate from the
University of Pennsylvania in 1941, where he studied under
Clarence Erwin McClung;
Morgan Hebard at the ANSP also encouraged his study of grasshoppers. This work was among the first to make use of the male phallic complex in grasshopper taxonomy beyond species-level analysis; this analysis divided grasshoppers into two groups based on the morphology of the ejaculatory sac. Roberts volunteered with the
U.S. Army during
World War II, joining the Medical Entomological Department. He became a
Major serving with the Malaria Survey Unit in the Philippines and New Guinea. The
American Entomological Society published the volumes, which the
U.S. War Department distributed in
loose leaf. The entomologist
Robert Matheson wrote in a review for
The Quarterly Review of Biology that it "should be a great help in the identification of the species" and praised the illustrations. It was important to those fighting malaria during World War II and helped saved thousands of lives. In 1966 and 1967 Roberts went to Costa Rica to collect arboreal grasshoppers. In order to get the grasshoppers down from the trees he invented a machine to shoot insecticide into the canopy and then dead insects would fall to plastic tarps on the ground. A parachute was launched into the treetops, and then an "insect bomb" was hoisted up to the parachute using pulleys.
The Philadelphia Inquirer discussed this as "one of his more colorful experiments" in its obituary for him. A 1978 catalogue of the ANSP included 35
holotypes for
taxa which Roberts had
described. Roberts' papers on Orthoptera were published over the span of 1937 to 1992; fifty-four of the grasshopper species he described remained
valid names as of 2009. the
American Ornithologists' Union, the
American Society of Mammalogists, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, the
American Society of Zoologists, and the
American Entomological Society. He was also in
Sigma Xi. ==Administratorship==