The Pransky interview: Dr Raffaello D’Andrea, Founder, CEO, and Chairman of the board at Verity; Entrepreneur; Professor; Scientist and Artist
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The following article is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry PhD and inventor regarding his pioneering efforts and the commercialization of bringing a technological invention to market. This paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The interviewee is Dr Raffaello D’Andrea, a highly successful entrepreneur and proven business leader and one of the world’s foremost leaders in robotics and machine learning. D’Andrea is Founder, CEO and Chairman of the Board at Verity, the world’s leading autonomous indoor drone company, as well as a Professor of Dynamic Systems and Control at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. D’Andrea is also one of the co-founders and advisors of Robo-Global, an index and research company focused on investments in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. In this interview, D’Andrea shares some of his business and personal experiences of working in industry and academia and his criteria for turning his ideas into successful working systems. Findings Raffaello D’Andrea’s entire career is built on his ability to bridge theory and practice. D’Andrea combined his love for science with his need to create and received a BS degree in engineering science at the University of Toronto, where he was awarded the Wilson Medal as the top graduating student in 1991. He obtained both his MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering at Caltech, and then he joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor. While on leave from Cornell, from 2003 to 2007, he co-founded the disruptive warehouse automation company Kiva Systems, where he led the systems architecture, robot design, robot navigation and coordination, and control algorithms efforts. In 2014, D’Andrea took robotics technology into the air and founded Verity, the world’s first company to deliver a fully integrated autonomous, indoor drone-based system solution. Originality/value Raffaello D’Andrea combines academia, business and the arts to reinvent autonomous systems. D’Andrea was a founding member of the Systems Engineering Program at Cornell, where he established robot soccer 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 win four world international RoboCup championships. Kiva Systems, co-founded by D’Andrea and acquired by Amazon in 2012, helped the re-branded Amazon Robotics to disrupt the entire warehousing and logistics systems industry. Additionally, D’Andrea is an internationally-exhibited new media artist, best known for the Robotic Chair (Ars Electronica, ARCO, London Art Fair, National Gallery of Canada) and Flight Assembled Architecture (FRAC Centre). With his team at Verity, he created the drone design and choreography for Cirque Du Soleil’s Paramour on Broadway, Metallica’s WorldWired Tour and Céline Dion’s Courage Tour. Other D’Andrea creations include the Flying Machine Arena, where flying robots perform aerial acrobatics, juggle balls, balance poles and cooperate to build structures; the Distributed Flight Array, a flying platform consisting of multiple autonomous single propeller vehicles that are able to drive, dock with their peers and fly in a coordinated fashion; the Balancing Cube, a dynamic sculpture that can balance on any of its edges or corners and its little brother Cubli, a small cube that can jump up, balance and walk; Blind Juggling Machines that can juggle balls without seeing them, and without catching them. D’Andrea is also collaborating with scientists, engineers, and wingsuit pilots to create an actively controlled suit that will allow humans to take off and land at will, to gain altitude, even to perch, while preserving the intimacy of wingsuit flight. D’Andrea has received the IEEE Robotics and Automation Award, the Engelberger Robotics Award, the IEEE/IFR Invention and Entrepreneurship Award in Robotics and Automation and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. In 2020, he was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame and elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".