Brian Gunter is an Assistant Professor in Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Rice University, and later his M.S. and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in orbital mechanics. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Gunter was on the faculty of the Delft University of Technology (TU-Delft) in the Netherlands, as a member of the Physical and Space Geodesy section. His research activities involve various aspects of spacecraft missions and their applications, such as investigations into current and future laser altimetry missions, monitoring changes in the polar ice sheets using satellite data, applications of satellite constellations/formations, and topics surrounding kinematic orbit determination. He has been responsible for both undergraduate and graduate courses on topics such as satellite orbit determination, Earth and planetary observation, scientific applications of GPS, and space systems design. He is currently a member of the AIAA Astrodynamics Technical Committee, and also serves as the Geodesy chair for the Fall AGU Meeting Program Committee. He has received a NASA group achievement award for his work on the GRACE mission, and he is also a former recipient of a NASA Earth System Science Graduate Fellowship. He is a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the International Association of Geodesy (IAG).

Education

• B.S., Mechanical Engineering, 1994, Rice University
• M.S., Aerospace Engineering, 2000, The University of Texas at Austin;
• Ph.D., Aerospace Engineering, 2004, The University of Texas at Austin;

Distinctions & Awards

Elected in 2020 to the status of Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Visiting Research Fellow, Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, 2011; NASA Earth System Science Graduate Fellowship, 2002-2004; NASA Group Achievement Award, GRACE Project Team, 2004; Dolores Zohr b Liebmann Graduate Fellowship, 2000-2003; Earl Wright Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Engineering, 2000-2001

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.

Dr. Anirban Mazumdar joined Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering in 2018. Dr. Mazumdar studies robot mobility with the goal of understanding and achieving agile, versatile, and efficient robot behaviors in unstructured environments. His previous experience includes a postdoctoral research position in the High Consequence Automation and Robotics Group at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. He has broad experience with novel robotic systems including energy efficient bipedal robots, reconfigurable aerial vehicles, prosthetic devices, and relaxed stability mobile robots.

Dr. J.V.R. Prasad is a professor in the School of Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology working in the area of flight mechanics and control. He received his B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India and his M.S and Ph.D. degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. He is currently a co-principal investigator and the associate director for the US Army, Navy and NASA sponsored Vertical Lift Rotorcraft Center of Excellence (VLRCOE) program at Georgia Tech. He has extensive research and design experience in rotorcraft system modeling and control, propulsion system modeling and control, and autonomous air vehicle modeling and control. He published parts of four books, sixty refereed journal papers, more than 250 conference papers and 80 research project reports. He has 18 invention disclosures and five patents to his credit. He is a recipient of the 2009 Melville Medal award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the 2015 Aero Lion Technologies Outstanding Journal Paper award from the International Journal of Unmanned Systems. He served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Helicopter Society (AHS), chair of the Handling Qualities and UAV Tech Committees of the AHS, and as member and secretary of the Atmospheric. Flight Mechanics Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He currently serves as a member of the editorial board for the International Journal on Mathematical Modeling and Simulation and the advisory board for the International Journal of Unmanned Systems. He is a Fellow of the AIAA, a Technical Fellow of the AHS and a member of the ASME.