Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Laptop Science and Synthetic Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Panasonic Professor of Laptop Science, has obtained the 2026 Excessive-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President for her contributions to robotics, synthetic intelligence, and autonomous techniques.
Awarded collectively by the Bavarian State Authorities and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, it’s the most extremely endowed award for know-how and engineering in Germany. Rus accepted the prize on July 23 on the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residence.
The choice committee cited 4 strands of her work: self-organizing robotic collectives, tender robotics, autonomous mobility, and brain-inspired synthetic intelligence. Collectively they describe a 30-year effort to construct machines that maintain up exterior the lab, in circumstances nobody scripted upfront.
That effort has arrived at a second when bodily AI has grow to be a preoccupation for business leaders and policymakers alike. When human-robot collaboration comes up, the examples are usually family chores or the manufacturing unit ground. Rus is working a number of orders of magnitude wider than that, creating algorithms and techniques that put autonomous robots into transportation, agriculture, drugs, the house, and environmental monitoring. She can be a pioneer of soppy robotics, the place compliant machines manipulate the world extra safely and adapt to it extra readily than inflexible ones can.
Her emphasis all through has been on giving robots the intelligence to cause and adapt in the true world, by algorithms whose habits might be defined.
“AI provides machines the flexibility to do work that people do not need to do,” she says. “It isn’t a battle between people and machines. Each type a system that solves issues that neither people nor machines can remedy alone.”
At CSAIL she leads the Distributed Robotics Laboratory, the place that precept has produced some uncommon options to sturdy issues. Her group helped construct an ingestible origami robotic able to retrieving swallowed button batteries from a toddler’s digestive tract, and a fleet of small autonomous boats that assemble themselves into bridges and platforms, turning a metropolis’s waterways into infrastructure that may be reconfigured on demand.
She additionally helped invent liquid neural networks, an structure impressed by the compact nervous system of a millimeter-long worm. The networks can steer a car by an unfamiliar atmosphere utilizing as few as 19 management neurons, a stage of effectivity that standard architectures can’t strategy. The analysis led Rus and former CSAIL associates Ramin Hasani, Alexander Amini, and Mathias Lechner to discovered Liquid AI out of MIT CSAIL, constructing fashions designed from the beginning for the {hardware} constraints of the gadgets they run on.
“Daniela Rus is a pioneer in tender robotics and bodily AI,” famous Lorenzo Masia, professor of clever bio-robotic techniques on the Technical College of Munich, in a press launch. “The prize will assist to convey this science to the forefront.”
Rus’ earlier honors embody the 2025 IEEE Edison Medal and the 2024 John Scott Award. She is a member of the 2002 class of MacArthur Fellows and has been elected to the French Nationwide Academy of Medication, the Nationwide Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a fellow of the Affiliation for Computing Equipment, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Affiliation for the Development of Synthetic Intelligence.
