Dr. Sentis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D and M.S. degrees from Stanford University where he was also a Postdoctoral Fellow. He holds a B.S. (Honors Thesis) degree in Telecommunications and Electronics Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). He worked in Silicon Valley as a Control Systems Engineer where he programmed Fanuc Robots for the Clean Room Automation Industry. In Austin, he directs the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory. He was the UT Austin's Lead for DARPA's Robotics Challenge entry with NASA Jonhnson Space Center in 2013. His research focuses on save physical human robot interaction, whole-body operational space control of human centered robots, building and controlling Series Elastic Actuators, mobile manipulation in rough terrains, and dynamic bipedal locomotion. His research has been funded by NASA, the Office of Naval Research, DARPA, the Chinese manufacturing sector and Willow Garage. He has over 50 Journal and Conference publications, gathering 1270 scientific citations, and an i-10 index factor of 19.

Dr. Fok is a research fellow working in the Human Centered Robotics Lab (HCRL) at UT Austin under the direction of Prof. Luis Sentis. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Washington University in St. Louis in 2010 with a focus on highly adaptive middleware for wireless sensor networks. After graduating, he did a two year postdoc at UT Austin's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering where he managed the Pharos Mobile Computing Laboratory and frequently deployed autonomous mobile robots in both indoor and outdoor environments for mobile computing and wireless networking experiments. In 2012 he joined the HCRL where he co-developed the ControlIt! whole body operational space control middleware that was used on Valkyrie, NASA JSC's first humanoid robot. ControlIt! is open-source (https://robotcontrolit.com) and may one day serve as a unifying foundation upon which whole body control strategies are implemented, tested, and deployed. In addition to working on ControlIt! and middleware in general, Dr. Fok's other research interests include cloud robotics, swarm robotics, adaptive control, sensing, cognitive decision making software, visual recognition software, real-time software, deep learning, and building robots and making them useful.