The 2026 IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems
July 29 - August 4, 2026
Prague, Czech Republic

Oussama Khatib received his PhD from Sup'Aero, Toulouse, France, in 1980. He is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Robotics Laboratory at Stanford University.

His research in robotics focuses on novel control architectures, algorithms, sensing, and human-friendly designs for advanced capabilities in complex environments. With an emphasis on enabling robots to interact cooperatively and safely with humans and the physical world, his work also contributes to the understanding of human movement for therapy, athletic training, and performance enhancement. Research on cognitive task representation and physical skills further supports the transfer of these insights toward greater robot autonomy.

Building on these core capabilities, his work explores applications in healthcare and wellness, industry and services, agriculture and smart cities, as well as in dangerous and inaccessible environments such as deep oceans, mines, and space.

He is President of the International Foundation of Robotics Research (IFRR) and a Fellow of IEEE. He serves as Editor of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR) series and the Springer Handbook of Robotics, which received the American Publishers Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences and Mathematics.

He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the IEEE Robotics and Automation (IEEE/RAS) Pioneering Award, the IEEE/RAS George Saridis Leadership Award, the Distinguished Service Award, the Japan Robot Association (JARA) Award, the Rudolf Kalman Award, the IEEE Technical Field Award, and the Engelberger Award. Professor Khatib is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Chuchu Fan is an Associate Professor (pre-tenure) in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT.

Before that, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University.

Her research group, Realm at MIT, focuses on using rigorous mathematics, including formal methods, machine learning, and control theory, for the design, analysis, and verification of safe autonomous systems.

Chuchu is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, and the 2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Marija Popović is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft, where she is part of the Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory.

Previously, she was a Junior Research Group Leader at the Cluster of Excellence "PhenoRob" at the University of Bonn and a Research Associate at Imperial College London. She completed her PhD at ETH Zurich in 2019. Her research focuses on robotics and AI, focusing on robotic exploration, active sensing, mapping, computer vision and machine learning.

Jorge Peña Queralta leads the Embodied Mobile Agents Research Group at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, where he is a senior lecturer on reinforcement learning. He is also co-founder of Binabik.ai, a startup building an agentic brain for humanoid robots, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Turku in Finland. Before that, he has been a CTO at Swiss robotics startup DAAV, developing autonomous solutions micro-mobility in large-scale indoor environments, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich.

His research group focuses on Agentic Embodied AI and Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for mobile robots, with a particular emphasis on quadrupeds, humanoids, and mobile manipulation platforms.

Fabrizio holds a Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Rennes 1 and Inria Rennes. Following research positions at the Zentrum für Telematik (Germany), Boston University (USA), and EPFL (Switzerland)—where he specialized in drone swarms and human-robot interfaces—he joined Leonardo S.p.A. in 2021.

Currently, he is the Head of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at Leonardo, managing a team of 15 researchers dedicated to advancing autonomous flight technologies.

Itzik Klein received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, in 2004 and 2007, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Geo-information Engineering from the Technion in 2011.

He is an Associate Professor heading the Autonomous Navigation and Sensor Fusion Lab (ANSFL) and Chair of the Hatter Department of Marine Technologies at the Charney School of Marine Sciences, University of Haifa.

He is an IEEE Senior Member and an IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (OES) Distinguished Lecturer. He serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation (J-ISPIN) and Elsevier Results in Engineering, and is the founding editor in the area of sensing and perception for automotive applications for the IEEE Open Journal of Vehicular Technology editorial board.

He is the director of the university’s AI Research Center and has a wide range of experience in navigation systems and sensor fusion from both industry and academic perspectives. His research interests lie at the intersection of artificial intelligence with inertial sensing, sensor fusion, and robotics.

Martin Saska is full professor at Czech Technical University in Prague and founder of Fly4Future and Eagle.one companies. He received his Ph.D. degree at University of Wuerzburg, Germany, within the PhD program of Elite Network of Bavaria, 2009. Since 2009, he is a research fellow at Czech Technical University in Prague, where he founded and heads the Multi-Robot Systems lab (https://mrs.fel.cvut.cz) with more than 50 researchers.

He was a visiting scholar at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA in 2008, and at University of Pennsylvania, USA in 2012, 2014 and 2016, where he worked with Vijay Kumar's group within GRASP lab. He is an author or co-author of >200 publications in peer-reviewed conferences with multiple best paper awards and >150 publications in impacted journals, including IJRR, AURO, JFR, ASC, EJC, with >9000 citations indexed by Scholar and H-index 52.

His team won multiple robotic challenges in MBZIRC 2017, MBZIRC 2020 and DARPA SubT competitions (https://mrs.fel.cvut.cz/competitions/mbzirc2017-compe, https://mrs.fel.cvut.cz/competitions/mbzirc2020-compe, https://mrs.fel.cvut.cz/competitions/darpa-compe).