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.’”

Dr. Tsiotras holds the David & Andrew Lewis Endowed Chair in the School of Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also associate director at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. His current research interests include nonlinear and optimal control and their connections with AI, planning, and decision-making, emphasizing autonomous ground, aerial, and space vehicles applications. He has published more than 350 journal and conference articles in these areas. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgia Tech, Dr.

Dr. Sadegh's early research work was in the field of robotics and automation. His major contribution to this field was the development of a class of adaptive and learning controllers for nonlinear mechanical systems including robotic manipulators. This work, which evolved from his doctoral research, enables a robot to learn a repetitive task through practice, much like a human being, and without requiring a precise model.

I am currently Professor and KUKA Chair for Robotics in the School of Interactive Computing, and the Executive Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I am also Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jaydev P. Desai, Ph.D, is currently a Professor and BME Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in August 2016, he was a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). He completed his undergraduate studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 1993. He received his M.A. in Mathematics in 1997, M.S. and Ph.D.