Ai-Ping Hu is a senior research engineer in the Georgia Tech Research Institute's Food Processing Technology Division. Ai-Ping received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has worked at a start-up robotics company for a number of years before joining GTRI in 2009.Ai-Ping research interests include advanced controls for unstructured environments and agricultural robotics. Pulkit Kapur is a Senior Industry Manager for Robotics and Autonomous Systems at MathWorks.

Mike Heiges received the Ph.D. degree from the Georgia Tech School of Aerospace Engineering, in 1989. He is currently a Principal Research Engineer with the Georgia Tech Research Institute, where he works as the Associate Division Chief of the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Division. His background is in aircraft flight dynamics and automatic control and he manages several of GTRI’s swarming UAV programs. He is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a member of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI).

My primary interest is floating ice systems - Jupiter's moon Europa and Earth's ice shelves. I am interested in how these environments work and how they may become habitable. I have chosen to focus on Europa because of its potential to have what other places may not have: a stable source of energy from tides that can power geological cycles over the lifetime of the solar system. At its most basic form, life is like a battery, depending upon redox reactions to move electrons.