Marbles, Magnets, and Water: Learning and Control in the Physical World
Bio Raffaello D’Andrea is a professor at ETH Zurich, where he founded the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control. His research on the control of and learning in autonomous systems has been built around experimental platforms such as the Flying Machine Arena, Cubli, and the Blind Juggler. He joined the Cornell faculty in MAE in 1997, where he helped establish the Systems Engineering program and led the robot soccer team to four RoboCup world championships.
In 2003 he co-founded Kiva Systems, where he led the system architecture, robot design, and navigation and control algorithms. Kiva is now Amazon Robotics, which has deployed more than one million robots. He is the founder and a board member of Verity, whose autonomous indoor drones operate unattended in industrial facilities, monitoring inventory and inspecting infrastructure for clients including IKEA and Maersk.
He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, an inductee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and a recipient of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Award. His work with autonomous machines as an artistic medium is held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the FRAC Centre and has been shown at venues including the Venice Biennale and in live performances with Cirque du Soleil and Metallica.