Ajith K. Gopal, Ph.D., is currently an engineering manager at Land Systems South Africa, where he is responsible for new technology strategy and development for the company. In 2007, Dr. Gopal established the MIAS (Mobile, Intelligent, Autonomous Systems) research group at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa, where he served as the research leader for 2007 and 2008. He has published four papers relating to composite and smart materials in the Journal of Composite Materials and International Conferences on Composite Science and Technology. He has also published a paper on path planning in the Defense Science Journal and a book chapter on data fusion in robotics in Multi-Sensor Data Fusion with MATLAB (CRC Press, 2009) and has guest-edited a special issue of the Defense Science Journal on MIAS.