Edward Tunstel
Edward Tunstel is the moderator for the #WeRobot Field Robotics panel at 1:45pm on Friday, September 24th. The panel will feature the following papers:
Robots in the Ocean
Annie Brett
Smart Farming and Governing AI in East Africa: Taking Gendered Relations and Vegetal Beings into Account
Jeremy de Beer, Laura Foster, Chidi Oguamanam, Katie Szilagyi, and Angeline Wairegi
On the Practicalities of Robots in Public Spaces
Cindy Grimm and Kristen Thomasen
Edward Tunstel received his B.S. and M.E. degrees in Mechanical Engineering, with a concentration in robotics, from Howard University. His thesis addressed the use of AI-based symbolic computation for automated modeling of robotic manipulators / arms. In 1989 he joined the Robotic Intelligence Group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) supporting research & development activities on NASA planetary rover projects. As a JPL Fellow he received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Mexico. His dissertation addresses distributed fuzzy logic & knowledge-based control of adaptive hierarchical behavior-based systems with application to mobile robot navigation.
After 18 years at JPL, Dr. Tunstel joined the Space Department of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in 2007 as its Space Robotics and Autonomous Control Lead and later served as Senior Roboticist in its Research & Exploratory Development Department and Intelligent Systems Center. After a decade with APL, Dr. Tunstel directed robotics R&D at the United Technologies Research Center for several years before joining Motiv Space Systems, Inc., where he is currently the CTO. He is a Fellow of IEEE and Jr. Past President of the IEEE SMC Society, having previously served as its President, in several of its VP roles, and as General Chair of the 2011 IEEE SMC conference. He is an active member of the IEEE SMC Technical Committees on Robotics & Intelligent Sensing, on Brain-Inspired Cognitive Systems, and on Model-Based Systems Engineering, IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Space Robotics, and the AIAA Space Automation and Robotics Technical Committee. He is an Associate Editor or Editorial Board Member of five international engineering journals. He previously served as Chief Technologist of NSBE Space, a special interest group of NSBE Professionals, and held memberships in the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, and ASME.
In academia, he is an adjunct faculty member of Deakin University in Australia, holds the distinction of Honorary Professor at Obuda University in Hungary, chairs an advisory board for an autonomy center of excellence (TECHLAV) at N.C. A&T State University, and has also served as NASA Technical Monitor for undergraduate student research programs and for NASA Faculty Awards for Research as well as co-advisor and committee member for graduate thesis and dissertation research at several universities. He has authored over 170 journal, book chapter and conference publications, and has edited or co-authored 5 books in his areas of expertise.