MIT Professor Daniela Rus Wins Germany's Top Engineering Award for Physical AI
MIT News AI · rss · 2026-07-31
Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has been awarded the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President. Jointly awarded by the Bavarian State Government, it is the most highly endowed award for technology and engineering in Germany.
The selection committee cited her 30-year effort across four pillars: self-organizing robot collectives, soft robotics, autonomous mobility, and brain-inspired AI. She focuses on giving robots the intelligence to reason and adapt in the real world. Her group has developed ingestible origami robots and liquid neural networks—capable of steering a vehicle with as few as 19 control neurons—which later spawned the startup Liquid AI.
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