Russ Tedrake

Russ Tedrake is the Vice President of Robotics Research at Toyota Research Institute (TRI). Tedrake manages a team devoted to producing a world-class simulation capability for TRI with a simple vision: What if we could develop real-world robots and autonomous vehicles completely in software (and trust that they will work in the real world)? Tedrake’s team also pursues fundamental research on “Enabling Technologies” for TRI Robotics, with a specific focus on manipulation and soft robotics.

Tedrake is also the Toyota Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Aero/Astro, and he is a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). He received a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2004.

Tedrake is the Director of the MIT CSAIL Center for Robotics and was the leader of MIT’s entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. He is a recipient of 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. His research has been recognized with numerous conference best paper awards, including ICRA, Robotics: Science and Systems, Humanoids, Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, as well as the inaugural best paper award from the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Whole-Body Control.