Marc Raibert is Executive Director of The AI Institute. In this role, he drives The Institute’s strategic roadmap and spearheads recruitment efforts to achieve the organization’s mission of developing technology that enables future generations of intelligent machines.
Raibert also serves as the Chairman of the Board at Boston Dynamics, which he founded in 1992. A spin-off from MIT, Boston Dynamics is arguably the most influential pure-play robotics organization in the world, having produced robots such as BigDog, Atlas, Stretch, and Spot – the latter two are available for commercial purchase and used by organizations around the globe.
A lifelong roboticist, Raibert started his robotics career more than 45 years ago as a graduate student at MIT, where he wrote software that learned the dynamics of a robot manipulator. His work has influenced modern dynamic robots, including legged and mobile-manipulation robots. He was the first to create robots that balance as they walk and run, and this early focus on dynamics helped form the foundation for today’s commercialized mobile robots.
Over the last three decades, Raibert has emerged as a leading figure in robotics, having delivered numerous keynote lectures and interviews, including TED, 60 Minutes, Turing Institute, WebSummit, Wired 25, MARS, REMARS, and many others. He devoted 18 years as an academic researcher and faculty member at CalTech/JPL, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT. Raibert is a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI, a member of the National Academy Engineering, received the 2022 Engelberger Award in Technology, and the 2022 IEEE Pioneer Award in Robotics. Even more rewarding, two of Raibert’s robots were inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2008 and 2012.
