Daniela Rus

Timeline

1. 1985–1992

   Training in computing and manipulation

   Rus earned a computer science and mathematics degree from Iowa in 1985, a master’s from Cornell in 1990 and a doctorate from Cornell in August 1992. Her doctoral thesis concerned fine motion planning for dexterous manipulation, supervised by John Hopcroft.

2. 1994–2004

   Robotics at Dartmouth and MIT

   She was an assistant professor at Dartmouth from 1994 to 2000 and an associate professor from 2000 to 2003. She became a Dartmouth professor in 2003 and an MIT associate professor in 2004. Her teaching included AI and robot design, programming and algorithms.

3. 2003–2004

   Modular robots and sensor networks

   Rus and Zachary Butler published shared research on distributed planning and control for modular robots in 2003. With Butler, Keith Kotay and Kohji Tomita, she published work on decentralized locomotion control in 2004. She also researched robots and sensor networks with Vijay Kumar and Sanjiv Singh.

4. As of October 2026

   Designing machines for human environments

   Her research addresses autonomy, interfaces between people and robots, and tools to design and fabricate robots. Her research aims to develop reasoning, learning and adaptation to complex tasks. The applications range across transportation, environmental work and medicine; not all are deployed systems.