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’s essentially the most highly endowed award for technology 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 robot collectives, soft robotics, autonomous mobility, and brain-inspired artificial intelligence. Together they describe a 30-year effort to construct machines that delay outside the lab, in conditions nobody scripted upfront.
That effort has arrived at a moment when physical AI has turn out to be a preoccupation for industry leaders and policymakers alike. When human-robot collaboration comes up, the examples are likely to be household chores or the factory floor. Rus is working several orders of magnitude wider than that, developing algorithms and systems that put autonomous robots into transportation, agriculture, medicine, the house, and environmental monitoring. She can be a pioneer of soppy robotics, where compliant machines manipulate the world more safely and adapt to it more readily than rigid ones can.
Her emphasis throughout has been on giving robots the intelligence to reason and adapt in the true world, through algorithms whose behavior could be explained.
“AI gives machines the flexibility to do work that humans don’t desire to do,” she says. “It is not a battle between humans and machines. Each 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. Her group helped construct an ingestible origami robot 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 city’s waterways into infrastructure that could be reconfigured on demand.
She also helped invent liquid neural networks, an architecture inspired by the compact nervous system of a millimeter-long worm. The networks can steer a vehicle through an unfamiliar environment using as few as 19 control neurons, a level of efficiency that conventional architectures cannot approach. The research led Rus and former CSAIL affiliates Ramin Hasani, Alexander Amini, and Mathias Lechner to found Liquid AI out of MIT CSAIL, constructing models designed from the beginning for the hardware constraints of the devices they run on.
“Daniela Rus is a pioneer in soft robotics and physical AI,” noted Lorenzo Masia, professor of intelligent bio-robotic systems on the Technical University of Munich, in a press release. “The prize will help to bring this science to the forefront.”
Rus’ previous honors include 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 National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.