Daniela Rus receives Bavarian Minister-President's High-Tech Prize

MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President, awarded by the Bavarian State Government and Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The prize recognized four strands of her work: self-organizing robot collectives, soft robotics, autonomous mobility, and brain-inspired AI. Her research aims to build robots that reason and adapt in real-world conditions, with applications spanning transportation, agriculture, medicine, environmental monitoring, and the home. Specific projects include an ingestible origami robot for battery retrieval, self-assembling autonomous boats for urban waterways, and liquid neural networks inspired by a millimeter-long worm’s nervous system, which can control vehicles with as few as 19 neurons. The liquid-networks work led to the founding of Liquid AI, creating models designed for on-device hardware constraints. The award was presented on July 23 in Munich. Rus’s approach emphasizes explainable algorithms and human-robot systems that solve problems neither can solve alone.