Matthew Hale joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech as an Associate Professor in the spring of 2024. His research interests include multi-agent control and optimization, deceptive decision-making, and applications of these methods to drones and other robots. He has received the NSF CAREER Award, ONR YIP, and AFOSR YIP. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Matthew was Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida. He received his BSE from the University of Pennsylvania, and he received his MS and PhD from Georgia Tech.

After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, Gary McMurray interviewed for a number of jobs. Most were in the defense industry, and the job duties were very specific.

“I joke about one job that was to design fuel pumps for the aft section of cargo planes,” McMurray recalled. “I asked, ‘Well, what if I want to design fuel pumps for the front section?’ They said, ‘No. That’s a different skill set.’”

The job sounded too constraining and unappealing to McMurray, so he continued his job search, interviewing with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in 1989. He had been working in robotics, a relatively new field at the time.

“I was looking for something in robotics, and GTRI was trying to get into robotics,” he said. “They didn’t have anybody working in that field at all, so I was really the first person hired to work in that area. It gave me an opportunity to start from scratch and develop something unique and different. I really enjoyed that.”

Three decades later, McMurray still works at GTRI.

“I wear two hats in the organization,” he said. He is the division chief for the Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division, and an associate director for the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM), working with director Seth Hutchinson.

The Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division conducts research to improve the human condition through transforming the agricultural and food systems, sustainable use and access to energy and water, and improving workplace safety and pandemic response. IRIM is an umbrella under which robotics researchers, educators, and students from across campus can come together to advance a wide variety of robotics activities at the Institute.

The Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division has approximately 36 research faculty and 40 students. The unit hires about 10% of all the students at GTRI and maintains close ties with the academic side of campus.

“One of the things I enjoy in my role as a division chief is the ability to set the vision and mission,” McMurray said. “We’re a little bit different from the rest of GTRI because we don’t do the Department of Defense work. We work a lot with the campus, but we also work with other universities on sustainability projects regarding food or energy. The projects have the potential to make a big impact. I describe it as having one foot on the basic research side and one foot on the applied side. We have master’s and Ph.D. students doing cutting-edge basic research, and we’re also building systems and applying research and deploying things into the field.”

The division’s food processing research includes improving yield, food quality, and food safety while minimizing the environmental impact by applying image processing, robotics, biosensors, and environmental treatment technologies. The division also conducts air quality research, including monitoring and reducing the effects of vehicular emissions.

So, what’s the connection between food processing and auto emissions?

“To solve problems in both of those areas we employ general research technologies — robotics, chemical and biological sensing, data analytics, machine learning, systems engineering, and then energy and materials,” McMurray said. “Approaches that work in traditional manufacturing may not work in the food industry. There is no CAD drawing for a boneless chicken breast or a chicken leg. Each one is different. It’s also wet, slippery, and could be spoiled.”

That’s where sensing and data analytics come into play. The same applies to analyzing vehicular emissions.

“When you look at food processing, our work really brings together all of these different skill sets. And then when you look at the data analytics side of air quality emissions, the team has the longest continuous set of data about air quality in the city. This has been the key database that the EPA uses for studying carbon emissions for automobiles,” McMurray said.

After more than 30 years at GTRI, McMurray still gets excited when a plan comes together.

“The most rewarding part of the work is when you can bring together the basic research and the applied, build a system that does something new and novel, put it into the field and test it, and have somebody come back and say, ‘That’s really cool. That worked.’”

Prof. Pradalier is Associate Professor at GeorgiaTech Lorraine, the French campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology (a.k.a. GeorgiaTech) since September 2012. He defended his “Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches” (Authority to Supervise Research) in 2015 on the topic of “Autonomous Mobile Systems for Long-Term Operations in Spatio-Temporal Environments” at the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse (INPT). 

His objective is to extend the activity of the CNRS IRL2958 GT-CNRS towards robotics, leveraging on one side the strong robotic research inside CNRS and on the other side the collaboration potential with the Robotics and Intelligent Machines (RIM) laboratory at GTL. 

At the IRL, he is now the coordinator of the H2020 BugWright2 project, has been involved in H2020 project Flourish and PF7 project Noptilus, as well as in projects on environmental monitoring. 

From November 2007 until December 2012, Dr. Pradalier has been deputy director in the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zürich. In this role, he was the technical coordinator of the V-Charge project (IP, 2010-2014) and also involved in the development of innovative robotic platforms such as autonomous boats for environment monitoring or prototype space rovers funded by the European Space Agency. He is a founding member of the ETH start-up Skybotix, within which he was responsible for software development and integration. 

From 2004 to 2007, Dr. Pradalier was a research scientist at CSIRO Australia. He was then involved in the development of software for autonomous large industrial robots and an autonomous underwater vehicle for the monitoring of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. 

He received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (INPG) on the topic of autonomous navigation of a small urban mobility system and he is Ingénieur from the National Engineering School for Computer Science and Applied Math in Grenoble (ENSIMAG).

Charles Pippin is a Senior Research Scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, GTRI. His research interests include collaborative autonomy algorithms, machine learning, and multi-robot systems. In his current work, he is investigating cooperation between autonomous systems, as part of GTRI's Unmanned Systems Initiative. Charles received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2013. His research advisor was Prof. Henrik I. Christensen. Charles received an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2004 and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Sang's research and art practice focuses on robotic and computational tools that work together with human users. His vision proposes extreme synergies between machine tools and humans, with technology essentially becoming a natural extension of our hands. This way, he challenges the fear and criticism around AI and automation that they replace human endeavors, by showing how symbiotic machines can unlock new human explorations and aesthetics. The impact of his research spans from publications in top tier HCI conferences such as CHI, TEI, and NIME, journals including Leonardo and IEEE Pervasive Computing, to design awards and art exhibitions. Several of his work were awarded the Fast Company Innovation by Design Award, and have been shown in art exhibitions at SIGGRAPH ASIA, CHI, TEI, and more. His work A Flying Pantograph was included in the Otherly Space / Knowledge exhibition at the Asia Culture Center along with some of the most prominent new media artists today. In 2014, He was an artist-in-residence at Microsoft Research Studio 99 where he created Remnance of Form - an interactive light and shadow installation. His work has received extensive media coverage from BBC, WIRED, Discovery, Fast Company and so on, and he was invited to national and international events including Sebasi+Pan, TEDx events, Seoul Digital Forum, and more. He is starting at Georgia Tech Industrial Design as an assistant professor. He has helped Artmatr in the development of a machine painting technology and its creative use through collaboration with some of today's most prominent painters. He received his Ph.D. from MIT Media Lab in 2018. Prior to that, he was a software engineer at Samsung Electronics where he led the software development of eyeCan, an open-source DIY eye-mouse designed for people with motor disability. This project became the foundation of Samsung's C-LAB. He received his Bachelor and Master of Science from KAIST, focusing on 3D Computer Vision and Machine Learning.