Dr. Book began at Tech in 1974 as an assistant professor. He has maintained a longstanding interest in robotics, automatic controls, and in the special topic of his Ph.D. thesis, the control of flexible motion systems. 

He was instrumental in the formation of the Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems (CIMS) Program at Georgia Tech, serving as its founding director from 1983 to 1988. In 2001, he was appointed to the HUSCO/Ramirez Distinguished Chair in Fluid Power and Motion Control. Shortly thereafter he established the Georgia Tech Fluid Power and Motion Control Center. 

He retired from Georgia Tech in June of 2011 and was granted emeritus status and continues to be active in that capacity.

Dr. Gregory S. Sawicki is an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech with appointments in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences. He holds a B.S. from Cornell University ('99) and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of California-Davis ('01). Dr. Sawicki completed his Ph.D. in Human Neuromechanics at the University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor ('07) and was an NIH-funded Post-Doctoral Fellow in Integrative Biology at Brown University ('07-'09). Dr. Sawicki was a faculty member in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at NC State and UNC Chapel Hill from 2009-2017. In summer of 2017, he joined the faculty at Georgia Tech with appointments in Mechanical Engineering 3/4 and Biological Sciences 1/4.

Michael (Mick) West joined ECE from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in 2022. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Hawaii (UH) in 2006 and has over 28 years of professional experience with over 40 refereed journals and conference papers. 

West specializes in the development unmanned systems in extreme environments (under-ice, planetary, deep ocean, polar). He has been an invited speaker for United States Congressional leaders and their staff and top military personnel in the development of roadmaps for advancing current robotics research. He has served as PI on several Unmanned Systems programs developing novel enabling technologies including advanced control and power systems on underwater, ground, air and space platforms. West developed the first-of-its-kind under-ice vehicle, Icefin, in order to gather information about the changing polar ice and provide insight into areas of climate science, as well as biology and planetary science. The vehicle has been deployed over five seasons through the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica and provided never before seen images and scientific data of the Antarctic seafloor.

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.

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.’”

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. Prior to MathWorks, Pulkit worked at iRobot as a product manager launching several commercial robots globally. Pulkit has also worked in the areas of haptics and manipulation, developing and launching desktop-based haptic robotic devices. Pulkit has a bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in Robotics from the GRASP Lab at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Pulkit has over 10 years of research and industry experience in the field of robotics and autonomous systems.