Daniela Rus doesn't just build robots. She makes them think with their bodies, work in a pack, and... dissolve into your stomach.*

Image: IEEE Fellow Daniela Rus is the recipient of this year’s IEEE Edison Medal. (Katherine Taylor)

Imagine a world where a robot is not a bulky piece of hardware on wheels, but a flexible, almost living organism that can be swallowed like a pill so that it repairs you from the inside out. Or an army of cubes that assemble themselves into a tool for any task. It sounds like science fiction, but for Daniela Rus, director of MIT's legendary Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), it's a daily routine. Her philosophy is simple: robots should not replace humans, but give them "superpowers." And she embodies this idea in the most unexpected ways.

From scarcity in Romania to abundance of ideas at MIT

Rus' path to the top of robotics began in conditions far from high technology. She was born in Romania during the Ceausescu dictatorship, where there were shortages and restrictions. She even had a chance to work at a state-owned factory, making screws for locomotives. However, her parents, computer scientists and physicist, were able to emigrate to the United States in 1982, opening up a world of limitless possibilities for their daughter.

The turning point came at the University of Iowa, when Rus heard a lecture by John Hopcroft, the Turing Award winner. He stated that classical computer science has been solved, and the future belongs to systems that interact with the physical world. "It was like an open door," Rus recalls. She followed Hopcroft to Cornell, where she earned her PhD, and then founded her first robotics laboratory at Dartmouth, literally creating robots on a 3D printer for lack of a workshop.

Physical intelligence: when a robot thinks with its body

Today, Rus heads CSAIL, the largest interdisciplinary laboratory at MIT, bringing together 60 research groups. Here she develops the concept of "physical intelligence," a new kind of machine that understands a dynamic environment, handles unpredictability, and makes decisions in real time.

Instead of a pile of processors, her team creates soft robots inspired by nature. Their shape and materials themselves provide complex functions such as self-balancing, minimizing the need for heavy calculations. It's as if the chair itself understands how to stand on two legs, and the spoon understands how not to spill the soup.

The strangest (and most useful) projects

It is in the Rus laboratory that some of the most futuristic robots in the world are born.:

Edible origami robots. A prototype created to extract batteries swallowed by children. These are soft, artistically folded devices with magnetic materials that the doctor controls from the outside. When the robot reaches the stomach, it grabs the foreign object and brings it out. After completing the mission, the robot, made of digestible materials, safely dissolves in the body. The ideal employee: completed the task and disposed of himself.

Modular "lego robots". Systems like MIT's M-Blocks or NASA's SuperBots, which can connect, detach, and rearrange themselves to take a form for crawling, climbing, or sliding. Imagine that your tool kit in the garage is going to assemble itself into the wrench or ladder you need.

A swarm of smart cars. Thousands of robots, like in Amazon warehouses, can work as a single adaptive organism, communicating continuously to distribute tasks and avoid collisions.

To give robots a true "brain," Rus co-founded Liquid AI in 2023. She is developing "liquid" neural networks inspired by a simple worm brain that can continuously learn and adapt right inside the robot's hardware, without cloud computing.

Recognition and a look into the future

Rus' contribution has been recognized with the highest awards in the field of robotics: the Engelberger Award (2017), the IEEE Pioneer in Robotics and Automation Award (2018) and, finally, the IEEE Edison Medal in 2025 for "leadership and pioneering contributions in modern robotics."

Looking at her work, we can imagine how our lives will change. Robots with physical intelligence will be able to search for people under rubble, help firefighters in smoke-filled buildings. And when such machines become widespread, entire ecosystems will appear for their integration into business processes. It is quite possible that hiring a robotic team to perform specific tasks will become as commonplace as looking for specialists on jobtorob.com 

For Daniela Rus herself, this is not just a technological race. This is the fulfillment of a mission formulated in his youth: to use technology to expand human capabilities. "Machines can help us achieve more, think faster, and live more fully," she says. And judging by what is being done in her laboratory, the future, where each of us will have our own mechanical "superpowers", is just around the corner.