James E. Bobrow is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of California, Los Angeles. After graduate school, Prof. Bobrow was a senior programmer analyst at McDonnell Douglas Automation Company, where he developed CAM software for the Unigraphics system. Dr. Bobrow joined UCI as an Assistant Professor in 1984. While at UCI, his research interests have included optimal control and motion planning for robots, design of pneumatic actuators and sensors for automation systems, robots for rehabilitation, and machine learning systems. Dr. Bobrow has also been a Visiting Professor in Computer Science at Stanford University and in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and he has created robots and automation devices for several start-up companies, including Robomedica, Inc. and Cobra Technologies. He has served on the program committees or organizing committees of the leading conferences in control systems and robotics. He is currently on the Engineering steering committee for Robomedica, Inc., and he is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics.