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.’”

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. Mazumdar started at the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in January of 2019 and currently has a courtesy appointment with the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. She graduated with her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed a postdoctoral appointment at Sandia National Laboratories in the Diagnostic Science and Engineering group. Her research interests include the design of new diagnostic techniques and sensor systems for studying combustion, multiphase flows, hypersonic flows, and energetic materials. Her group utilizes new composite sensing materials, optical diagnostics, magnetostatics, and system identification methods to study these complex physical phenomena.

I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing. I am also affiliated with the Georgia Tech Research Institute and serve as an Associate Director of ML@GT which is the machine learning center recently created at Georgia Tech. Previously I was a Research Scientist at SRI International Sarnoff in Princeton, and before that received my Ph.D. in 2010 with Professor Ron Arkin as my advisor. I lead the RobotIcs Perception and Learning (RIPL) lab. My areas of research specifically focus on the intersection of learning methods for sensor processing and robotics, developing novel machine learning algorithms and formulations towards solving some of the more difficult perception problems in these areas. I am especially interested in moving beyond supervised learning (un/semi/self-supervised and continual/lifelong learning) as well as distributed perception (multi-modal fusion, learning to incorporate information across a group of robots, etc.).

David Hu is a fluid dynamicist with expertise in the mechanics of interfaces between fluids such as air and water. He is a leading researcher in the biomechanics of animal locomotion. The study of flying, swimming and running dates back hundreds of years, and has since been shown to be an enduring and rich subject, linking areas as diverse as mechanical engineering, mathematics and neuroscience. Hu's work in this area has the potential to impact robotics research. Before robots can interact with humans, aid in minimally-invasive surgery, perform interplanetary exploration or lead search-and-rescue operations, we will need a fundamental physical understanding of how related tasks are accomplished in their biological counterparts. Hu's work in these areas has generated broad interest across the fields of engineering, biology and robotics, resulting in over 30 publications, including a number in high-impact interdisciplinary journals such as Nature, Nature Materials, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as well as popular journals such as Physics Today and American Scientist. Hu is on editorial board member for Nature Scientific Reports, The Journal of Experimental Biology, and NYU Abu Dhabi's Center for Center for Creative Design of Materials. He has won the NSF CAREER award, Lockheed Inspirational Young Faculty award, and best paper awards from SAIC, Sigma Xi, ASME, as well as awards for science education such as the Pineapple Science Prize and the Ig Nobel Prize. Over the years, Hu's research has also played a role in educating the public in science and engineering. He has been an invited guest on numerous television and radio shows to discuss his research, including Good Morning America, National Public Radio, The Weather Channel, and Discovery Channel. His ant research was featured on the cover of the Washington Post in 2011. His work has also been featured in The Economist, The New York Times, National Geographic, Popular Science and Discover His laboratory appeared on 3D TV as part of a nature documentary by 3DigitalVision, "Fire ants: the invincible army," available on Netflix.

Ai-Ping Hu is a principal research engineer in the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division. He received his BS in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining GTRI in 2009, Dr. Hu co-founded a start-up robotics company applying learning control to achieve high precision in lightweight flexible manufacturing robots.  His current research interests include agricultural robotics, nonlinear control and vision-guided manipulation.

Kinsey Herrin is a Senior Research Scientist in the Woodruff George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. She supports a number of wearable robotics research efforts across Georgia Tech's campus and holds the ABC credential for a Certified Prosthetist/Orthotist. Kinsey is passionate about advancing state of the art technology available to individuals with physical challenges and amputations as well as the exploration of wearable technology to augment and enhance human performance. She was the former Clinical Liaison & Coordinator and academic faculty within the Georgia Tech MSPO program. She completed her residency training in orthotics and prosthetics at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and the University of Michigan, respectively, and has over 10 years of experience working with and treating a wide variety of patients in clinical and research settings.

Professor Hays's research interests span computer vision, graphics, robotics, and machine learning. Before joining Georgia Tech, he was the Manning assistant professor of computer science at Brown University. James was a post-doc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. James received his B.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2003.

Frank L. Hammond III joined George W. Woodruff George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in April 2015. Prior to this appointment, he was a postdoctoral research affiliate and instructor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a Ford postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in 2010 from Carnegie Mellon University.

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.