Rafael Murrieta received the B. Sc. degree in Industrial Physics Engineering (1990), and the M.Sc. degree in Automatic Manufacturing Systems (1993), both from "Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey" (ITESM) Campus Monterrey. During his master, he was a research assistant of José Luis Gordillo in the CSI (former Artificial Intelligence Center) and CSIM of the ITESM campus Monterrey.
In 1995 he got a DEA "Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies" (master degree) in signals and images from the "Institut National Polytechnique" (INP) of Toulouse, France. In 1996, he was a visitor student at the Stanford Robotics Laboratory. He participated in the Autonomous Observer project. In November 1998 he received the Ph.D. from the INP of Toulouse. His Ph.D research was done in the group of "Robotique et Intelligence Artificielle" (RIA) of the "Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systemes du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Francaise" -LAAS/CNRS- in Toulouse, under the supervision of Maurice Briot and Michel Devy . This research was about artificial vision for outdoor autonomous robots. The outdoor mobile robots at RIA : Adam, Eve and Lama.In 1998-1999, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University . He worked on the Tactical Mobile Robotics project with Leo Guibas and Jean-Claude Latombe.
From January 2000 to July 2002 he was an assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at ITESM CCM, during his stay there he worked on motion planning, perception and experimental mobile robotics.
From September 2002 to July 2004 he was working in the Beckman Institute of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked with Seth Hutchinson . From August 2004 to January 2006 he was professor and director of the Mechatronics Research Center in ITESM CEM .