Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science, has received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President for her contributions to robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. The selection committee cited four strands of her work: self-organizing robot collectives, soft robotics, autonomous mobility, and brain-inspired artificial intelligence. Rus is working several orders of magnitude wider than that, developing algorithms and systems that put autonomous robots into transportation, agriculture, medicine, the home, and environmental monitoring. She is also a pioneer of soft robotics, where compliant machines manipulate the world more safely and adapt to it more readily than rigid ones can. Blogger's Review: Daniela Rus's work is a significant contribution to the field of artificial intelligence and robotics, and her research is expected to bring about revolutionary changes in various fields, including transportation, agriculture, medicine, and environmental monitoring.