Raffaello D’Andrea (born August 13, 1967 in Pordenone, Italy) a Canadian-Italian-Swiss engineer, artist, and entrepreneur. He is professor of dynamic systems and control at ETH Zurich. He is a co-founder of Kiva Systems (now operating as Amazon Robotics), and the founder of Verity. He was the faculty advisor and system architect of the Cornell Robot Soccer Team, four time world champions at the annual RoboCup competition. He is a new media artist, whose work includes The Table, the Robotic Chair, and Flight Assembled Architecture. He was a speaker at TED Global 2013 and spoke at TED 2016 held in February. He has won the 2016 IEEE Robotics and Automation Award. D'Andrea was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2020 for contributions to the design and implementation of distributed automation systems for commercial applications. In 2022, D'Andrea, along with Mick Mountz and Peter Wurman, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame® (NIHF) for the creation of the Kiva system, a mobile robotic material handling and order fulfillment solution that dramatically advanced warehouse order fulfillment for e-commerce. Life Born in Pordenone, Italy, D’Andrea moved to Canada in 1976, where he graduated valedictorian from Anderson Collegiate in Whitby, Ontario. He received a Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Toronto, graduating in Engineering Science (Major in Electrical and Computer Engineering) in 1991 and winning the Wilson Medal as the top graduating student that year. In 1997 he received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, under the supervision of John Doyle and Richard Murray. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1997. While on sabbatical in 2003, he co-founded Kiva Systems with Mick Mountz and Peter Wurman. He became Kiva Systems’ chief technical advisor in 2007 when he was appointed professor of dynamic systems and control at ETH Zurich. He founded Verity with Markus Waibel and Markus Hehn in 2014. Work Academic work After receiving his PhD in 1997, he joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor, where he was a founding member of the Systems Engineering program, and where he established robot soccer — a competition featuring fully autonomous robots — 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 four world championships at international RoboCup competitions