Amanda Prorok is a pioneer in the science of how robots work together. As Professor of Collective Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Pembroke College, she develops new ways for robots to “talk” to each other and make decisions in applications such as transport, logistics, disaster response, and environmental monitoring.
One of Prorok’s breakthroughs was introducing differentiable communication methods that allow robots to actively share and refine knowledge with one another. This shift, from isolated machine intelligence to collective intelligence, is changing how systems from delivery fleets to sensor networks may operate in the future.
Amanda Prorok’s interest in coordination traces back to her childhood. Growing up in a multilingual family across Brazil, Switzerland, and beyond, her early experiences with communication and adaptation fuelled her fascination with swarm robotics: the idea that many simple agents, working together, can produce behaviours greater than the sum of their parts.
Prorok’s career has been marked by both technical excellence and imaginative leaps. After earning her PhD at EPFL in Switzerland, where her thesis won the Asea Brown Boveri Prize for best dissertation in computer science, she conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Laboratory, a leading hub for robotics. At Cambridge, Prorok founded the Prorok Lab, which has since been recognised with awards including the prestigious ERC Starting Grant, an Amazon Research Award, and multiple Best Paper prizes.
By exploring how artificial agents cooperate, Prorok is revealing what it will take for human and machine systems to thrive together in increasingly complex environments. The same algorithms that help quadrotors avoid colliding mid-air could one day make city traffic flow more smoothly, or enable fleets of robots to deliver medical supplies in disaster zones.
