Daniela Rus receives Bavarian Minister-President's High-Tech Prize
Director of CSAIL and MIT professor honored for her contributions to robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. MIT Professor and CSAIL Director Daniela Rus has received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President for projects like self-organizing robot collectives, soft robotics, autonomous mobility, and brain-inspired artificial intelligence. Rachel Gordon | Alex Shipps | MIT CSAIL Publication Date : July 30, 2026 Press Inquiries Press Contact : Rachel Gordon Email: rachelg@csail.
Key Takeaways
- "The prize will help to bring this science to the forefront.
- Awarded jointly by the Bavarian State Government and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, it is the most highly endowed award for technology and engineering in Germany.
The selection committee cited four strands of her work: self-organizing robot collectives, soft robotics, autonomous mobility, and brain-inspired artificial intelligence.
- Rus is working several orders of magnitude wider than that, developing algorithms and systems that put autonomous robots into transportation, agriculture, medicine, the home, and environmental monitoring.
She is also a pioneer of soft robotics, where compliant machines manipulate the world more safely and adapt to it more readily than rigid ones can.
- Both form a system that solves problems that neither humans nor machines can solve alone.
" At CSAIL she leads the Distributed Robotics Laboratory, where that principle has produced some unusual solutions to durable problems.
- The research led Rus and former CSAIL affiliates Ramin Hasani, Alexander Amini, and Mathias Lechner to found Liquid AI out of MIT CSAIL, building models designed from the start for the hardware constraints of the devices they run on.
MIT Professor and CSAIL Director Daniela Rus has received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President for projects like self-organizing robot collectives, soft robotics, autonomous mobility, and brain-inspired artificial intelligence. Director of CSAIL and MIT professor honored for her contributions to robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. Rachel Gordon | Alex Shipps | MIT CSAIL Publication Date : July 30, 2026 Press Inquiries Press Contact : Rachel Gordon Email: rachelg@csail.
edu MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory : "Daniela Rus is a pioneer in soft robotics and physical AI," says Lorenzo Masia, professor of intelligent bio-robotic systems at the Technical University of Munich (not pictured). "The prize will help to bring this science to the forefront. " Rus is seen here, second from right.
Credits : Photo courtesy of the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts. Previous image Next image Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science, has received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President for her contributions to robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. Awarded jointly by the Bavarian State Government and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, it is the most highly endowed award for technology and engineering in Germany.
For more details please read the original article at MIT News AI.
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