Tad McGeer

Dr. Tad McGeer trained as an aeronautical engineer at Princeton and Stanford, and then joined the new Engineering Science faculty at Simon Fraser University in his native British Columbia. There he developed the concept of passive dynamic walking, which went on to be adopted as a paradigm for study of human locomotion and design of legged robots. In 1990 he returned to aeronautics, joining a Virginia start-up, Aurora Flight Sciences, as chief scientist. He headed early design studies on the Perseus and Theseus unmanned research aircraft, and then proposed the Aerosonde concept for long-range weather reconnaissance. This led to founding of The Insitu Group, beginning in a Silicon Valley garage in 1992, and moving to the Columbia River Gorge in 1994. Insitu pioneered development of miniature robotic aircraft in worldwide trials, with Aerosondes making the first unmanned Atlantic crossing (1998), first unmanned typhoon reconnaissance (2001), and first eye penetrations into tropical cyclones (2005).