Dr. Edward Tunstel is a roboticist and subject matter expert in intelligent and autonomous control systems. He has been a researcher, practitioner, and technical leader of advanced robotics and autonomous systems for several decades. He received B.S. and M.E. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Howard University and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Mexico. He is the Director-R&D of the Robotics Department in the Intelligent Systems Division at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), San Antonio, TX. 

Prior to joining SwRI, Dr. Tunstel was the CTO for a space robotics company, Motiv Space Systems, Inc., developing lunar rovers and on-orbit robotic servicing products. Before Motiv, he was the Associate Director and Group Leader for Robotics at the Raytheon Technologies Research Center developing robotic autonomy and human-collaborative robotics capabilities to enhance the company’s manufacturing and service applications. He spent the prior decade at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory as Space Robotics & Autonomous Control Lead and as Senior Roboticist in its Intelligent Systems Center leading robotics and autonomous systems R&D for space and national security/defense applications. For nearly two preceding decades, he served as Senior Robotics Engineer and Advanced Robotic Controls Group Leader at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he engineered autonomous navigation systems for Mars rovers and led remote rover mission operations activities on the Martian surface.

Dr. Tunstel’s research and practical experience has focused on autonomous mobile robot navigation, cognitive robotics, and intelligent control as well as cooperative and human-collaborative robotics, all motivated by interests in robotic systems engineering and AI-enabled autonomy. This includes applications of computational and artificial intelligence to sensor-based control and automated reasoning for autonomous mobile manipulation robots and vehicles, deployed individually and in teams, in ground, air, space, and planetary surface environments. He has authored/co-authored over 190 technical publications including five books on these topics, and his experience includes service to several international engineering journals as Editor-in-Chief, Editorial Board Member, and Associate Editor.

Dr. Tunstel is a Fellow of the IEEE and several AI organizations. He is a past President of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and has held memberships in the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society and the New York Academy of Sciences.