Tim Bretl joined the Aerospace Engineering faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. He is a faculty member in the Beckman Institute Artificial Intelligence group and a professor in the UIUC Department of Aerospace Engineering. He received a B.S. in Engineering and a B.A. in Mathematics from Swarthmore College in 1999. Bretl received a M.S. in 2000, then a Ph.D. in 2005, both in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University.
Tim's dissertation focused on motion planning for large free-climbing robots, which (like human free-climbers) rely only on frictional contact with rock features, not tools like pitons. This research led to a working implementation on a real robot, in cooperation with NASA-JPL. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Computer Science at Stanford University, where he extended this work to a variety of other legged robots, including a humanoid and a hexapod for lunar exploration.