Russ Tedrake

Russ is the Toyota Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, the Director of the Center for Robotics at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and the leader of Team MIT's entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Russ is also the Vice President of Robotics Research at the Toyota Research Institute. He is a recipient of the 2021 Jamieson Teaching Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Jerome Saltzer Award for undergraduate teaching, the DARPA Young Faculty Award in Mathematics, the 2012 Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching Award, and was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow. Professor Tedrake's research is focused on finding elegant control solutions for interesting (underactuated, stochastic, and/or difficult to model) dynamical systems that he can build and experiment with. He is particularly interested in finding connections between mechanics (especially non-smooth mechanics) and machine learning/optimization theory which enable robust control design for complex mechanical systems. These days he is primarily focused in merging more of the powerful tools from systems theory with machine learning for robotic manipulation. Please see the description of the Robot Locomotion Group for more information.