Raffaello D'Andrea

Raffaello D’Andrea’s career combines academics, business and the arts. He is Professor of Dynamic Systems and Control at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where his research redefines what autonomous systems are capable of. He is founder of Verity, a self-flying drone systems company and provider of drone failsafe technology. He is also co-founder of Kiva Systems (now operating as Amazon Robotics), a robotics and logistics company that develops and deploys intelligent automated warehouse systems. In addition, he is a new media artist, whose works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and are part of the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada and France’s FRAC Centre.

If there is a difference between having ideas and knowing which ones are possible, there is an even greater difference between knowing which ideas are possible and knowing how to turn those into physical, working realities. Raff believes that this kind of knowledge comes best through hands-on experience and a deep understanding of the fundamental principles at work.

In retrospect, D’Andrea considers himself lucky to have made it to adulthood. As a child he was fascinated by science and the physical world, and had a penchant for putting himself into his own scientific experiments. He learned about water pressure by jumping into a swimming pool with bricks attached to his legs and a garden hose attached to his mouth; knowledge of aerodynamic stability – or lack thereof – was gained by jumping from a rooftop with a lawn umbrella; he created hydrogen gas by electrolysis, and in the process flooded his basement with chlorine gas; the laws of inductance and Faraday’s law were painfully learned through the use of batteries, transformers, and his mouth as a poor-man’s voltmeter; innumerable experiments with fireworks, flammable liquids, gunpowder, and live ammunition resulted in several unplanned haircuts, and an appreciation for the incredible amount of energy stored in chemical bonds.

D’Andrea combined his love for science with his need to create by studying Engineering Science at the University of Toronto, where he received the Wilson Medal as the top graduating student in 1991. Then, after cycling from Vancouver to Toronto on a mountain bike, he moved west to begin graduate studies in the area of Systems and Control at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he worked on two separate projects: very theoretical research on the optimal design of systems, and very applied research on the use of pulsed air injection to eliminate instabilities in jet engines. After receiving his PhD in 1997, he joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor, where he was a founding member of the Systems Engineering program, and where he established robot soccer – a competition featuring fully autonomous robots – as the flagship, multidisciplinary team project. In addition to pioneering the use of semi definite programming for the design of distributed control systems, he went on to lead the Cornell Robot Soccer Team to four world championships at international RoboCup competitions in Sweden, Australia, Italy, and Japan.