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. Rus accepted the prize on July 23 at the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residence. The selection committee cited four 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 build machines that hold up outside the lab, in conditions no one scripted in advance.

That effort has ar… "It's not a battle between humans and machines. 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. Her group helped build an ingestible origami robot capable of retrieving swallowed button batteries from a child'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 can 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 architect…