Anthony L. Gunderman grew up in a household where both of his parents were engineers. But the roots of his fascination with machines came from the cars parked in his parents’ driveway — his dad’s 1977 Ford Thunderbird and 1991 F-150 XLT Lariat pickup truck.
“It was seeing those vehicles and the amount of raw horsepower they had,” said Gunderman, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the U of A. “As a teenage boy, I liked things that went boom.”
Today, Gunderman’s work focuses on robotic systems, where precision matters far more than raw power. His research combines robotics, control systems and sensing technologies to help machines operate safely in complex real-world environments. His work could lead to robotic systems that improve manufacturing, treat ruptured blood vessels in the brain or pick blackberries in the field.
“I like to think of myself as the utility box — being able to provide a skill set to help multiple stakeholders,” Gunderman said.
Technology Ventures secured a U.S. patent for a robotic berry picker, which Gunderman helped develop when he was still a Ph.D. student at the U of A. The system is designed to identify ripe berries and harvest them without bruising the delicate fruit, a task that has long challenged agricultural robotics.
His team’s medical robotic systems could let doctors in larger cities treat patients miles away in rural areas where specialists are scarce. The berry-picking system could help alleviate an agricultural labor shortage, lower the cost of nutritious fruit and ensure produce does not rot in the fields.
The ultimate goal of Gunderman’s wide-ranging work is to help people have healthy, longer and more productive lives. He especially wants to find ways to improve life for rural communities like the small town of Batesville, where Gunderman was raised.
“I want to give back to the same people that I grew up around and who supported me while I was growing up,” he said.
Gunderman also appreciates the technical challenges and opportunities of robotics, which may soon transform our daily lives.
“Even though we’ve been doing robotics research for decades, it’s a nascent field in terms of its application in our day-to-day lives,” he said.
Robotics also presents social challenges that Gunderman relishes. A system cannot just work in the lab. It must perform reliably in real-world conditions and meet the needs of the people who use it. Working with people outside the lab also lets Gunderman understand the real challenges people face and direct his research to solve those problems.
“Most of the technology that I’ve dealt with has been an extension of humans, as opposed to replacing a human,” he said.
For Gunderman, that philosophy reflects the same values he learned growing up in rural Arkansas: technology should make people’s lives better and expand what they’re able to do — even if the machines he builds today look very different from the high-horsepower cars that first sparked his fascination with engineering.
