Raffaello
D'Andrea

Biography

Raf­fael­lo D’Andrea is an Italian–Canadian–Swiss engi­neer, artist, and entre­pre­neur, cel­e­brat­ed for his pio­neer­ing con­tri­bu­tions to robot­ics, autonomous sys­tems, and artis­tic innovation.

Raised in Cana­da from age nine, D’Andrea grad­u­at­ed vale­dic­to­ri­an from Ander­son Col­le­giate in Whit­by, Ontario. He earned his Bach­e­lor of Applied Sci­ence in Engi­neer­ing Sci­ence from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to in 1991 and received the Wil­son Medal as the top grad­u­at­ing stu­dent. He then earned a Ph.D. in Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing from Cal­tech in 1997 under the guid­ance of John Doyle and Richard Murray.

D’Andrea joined the Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty fac­ul­ty in 1997, where he helped estab­lish the Sys­tems Engi­neer­ing pro­gram and led the Robot Soc­cer Team to four RoboCup world cham­pi­onships. RoboCup—widely regard­ed as the world’s largest and most influ­en­tial robot­ics and AI competition—was a prov­ing ground for advances in auton­o­my, machine vision, and mul­ti-agent coor­di­na­tion. In recog­ni­tion of his ear­ly-career con­tri­bu­tions, he received the Pres­i­den­tial Ear­ly Career Award in 2002.

In 2003, while on sab­bat­i­cal from Cor­nell, D’Andrea co-found­ed Kiva Sys­tems with entre­pre­neur Mick Mountz and pro­fes­sor Pete Wur­man. Their break­through was to have fleets of small mobile robots bring entire shelv­ing “pods” to sta­tion­ary work­ers. D’Andrea shaped the core sys­tem archi­tec­ture, devel­oped nav­i­ga­tion, fleet coor­di­na­tion, and adap­tive con­trol algo­rithms, and over­saw robot design. The robots learned to han­dle wide­ly vary­ing pay­loads, adapt­ed in real time to wear and tear, and shared nav­i­ga­tion­al improve­ments across the fleet—creating a con­stant­ly improv­ing col­lec­tive intel­li­gence. The sys­tem col­lapsed walk­ing time, increased stor­age den­si­ty, and enabled rapid through­put scal­ing as e‑commerce surged. In 2012, Ama­zon acquired Kiva for $775 mil­lion, lat­er rebrand­ing it as Ama­zon Robot­ics, which now oper­ates over a mil­lion Kiva-style robots in more than 300 facil­i­ties worldwide.

In 2008, D’Andrea joined the ETH Zurich fac­ul­ty, where he found­ed the Insti­tute for Dynam­ic Sys­tems and Con­trol. The research he leads is char­ac­ter­ized by hands-on, visu­al­ly com­pelling robot­ics platforms—like the Fly­ing Machine Are­na, Cubli, Cyber­Run­ner, Blind Jug­gling Machines, and the Dis­trib­uted Flight Array—all prob­ing the fron­tiers of autonomous systems.

In 2013, he co-found­ed ROBO Glob­al, launch­ing the world’s first exchange-trad­ed fund focused on robot­ics and AI; it was lat­er acquired by VettaFi in 2023. In 2014, with Markus Waibel and Markus Hehn, he co-found­ed Ver­i­ty, a com­pa­ny pio­neer­ing spa­tial intel­li­gence for indus­tri­al facil­i­ties. Verity’s autonomous indoor drones oper­ate con­tin­u­ous­ly at the edge, cap­tur­ing struc­tured, spa­tial, real-world data from every site. This time-stamped data—enriched with infor­ma­tion from clients’ WMS and ERP systems—is aggre­gat­ed in Verity’s cloud plat­form to deliv­er real-time insights that dri­ve oper­a­tional excel­lence across sin­gle sites or entire net­works. One of the few com­pa­nies to have deployed autonomous, cloud–edge solu­tions at scale, Verity’s sys­tems are in use at near­ly 200 sites world­wide as of the end of 2025, with clients includ­ing IKEA, Maer­sk, and UPS.

His work has earned numer­ous honors—including induc­tion into the Logis­tics Hall of Fame (2024), the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Engi­neer­ing (2020), the Nation­al Inven­tors Hall of Fame (2020), the IEEE Robot­ics and Automa­tion Award (2016), and the Engel­berg­er Robot­ics Award (2015).

D’Andrea is also a cel­e­brat­ed new media artist, explor­ing the expres­sive poten­tial of autonomous machines in both gallery spaces and large-scale per­for­mances. His creations—such as The Table, The Robot­ic Chair, and Flight Assem­bled Architecture—have been exhib­it­ed inter­na­tion­al­ly at the Venice Bien­nale, the Nation­al Gallery of Cana­da, and the FRAC Cen­tre. Extend­ing this artis­tic vision beyond tra­di­tion­al venues, his chore­o­graphed aer­i­al robot­ics have illu­mi­nat­ed major live events for artists includ­ing Metal­li­ca, Drake, Céline Dion, Justin Bieber, and Cirque du Soleil, merg­ing robot­ics with chore­og­ra­phy, light, and music to cre­ate immer­sive experiences.

Blend­ing engi­neer­ing pre­ci­sion with cre­ative vision, D’Andrea cre­ates sys­tems that learn, adapt, and inspire. From CyberRunner’s phys­i­cal intel­li­gence to Verity’s large-scale spa­tial intel­li­gence plat­form, and from the art gallery to the con­cert stage, his work chal­lenges assump­tions about auton­o­my and reveals how machines can enrich both indus­try and imagination.

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