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.

Tim develops tools for motion analysis, planning, and control. These tools include geometric search algorithms, methods of model reduction, and convex optimization routines that take advantage of problem structure. He is applying these tools to a diverse set of mechanical and biological systems: legged robots for planetary exploration, autonomous sail-planes for atmospheric and environmental science, neuro-prosthetic devices with a control interface designed using biological principles, and robotic manipulators for intelligent machining of deformable objects. All of these applications are safety-critical, so there is a strong emphasis on trust: tools must be practical, easy to implement, and have verifiable performance guarantees.