Women in Robotics: Global Innovators
Pioneers shaping robotics across continents and industries.
Innovation knows no borders. Around the world, robotics is being reimagined by researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs who bring new perspectives to how technology can serve society.
This October, we’re taking a deeper dive into our 2025 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About list, celebrating five honorees each week. This week, we’re highlighting Global Innovators. These women are pioneers shaping robotics across continents and industries.
From autonomous drones and LiDAR navigation in China to humanoid design in Switzerland, assistive robot learning in Germany, and AI-driven vision systems in Spain, these leaders are advancing robotics for a more connected, capable world.
These women remind us that progress in robotics is not defined by geography. It’s driven by imagination, collaboration, and a shared belief in what’s possible.
Xiaorui Zhu
Dr. Xiaorui Zhu is a pioneering Chinese roboticist who earned her PhD from the University of Utah in 2006. She co‑founded DJI—today the world’s largest consumer‑drone maker—and later co‑founded RoboSense, which develops LiDAR sensors for autonomous vehicles. She is now director of the Galaxy Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Research Institute.
Zhu’s research interests span mobile robots, UAVs and autonomous driving, and she has chaired technical programs for major IEEE robotics conferences. Her contributions have been recognized with awards including China’s National Science & Technology Progress Award. Beyond entrepreneurship, she works to inspire women engineers in China’s growing robotics sector.
Lijin Aryananda
Lijin Aryananda is a robotics researcher and engineer with more than 15 years of experience across Europe, North America, and Asia. After earning her PhD at MIT’s Humanoid Robotics Laboratory, she moved to the University of Zurich’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2007 as a postdoctoral researcher. She later held senior industry roles, including chief technology officer at QualySense AG, technical project leader at Hocoma AG, head of robotic platform at Wyss Zurich, and chief technology officer at Auxivo AG.
Aryananda’s expertise spans humanoid robotics, industrial automation, and medical devices. She is currently a scientific researcher at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), where she works on artificial-intelligence methods for tomography reconstruction. Having bridged academia and start-ups, she advocates for inclusive leadership and designs systems that combine AI, perception, and robustness for real-world use.
Georgia Chalvatzaki
Georgia Chalvatzaki is a Full Professor of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt, where she leads the Interactive Robot Perception & Learning (PEARL) Lab. Her research explores how robots can understand and adapt to humans, focusing on perception, learning, and mobile manipulation. She develops human-centric methods that allow robots to act safely and intelligently in everyday environments, from predicting human motion to learning complex manipulation skills. Her current flagship project, the ERC Starting Grant SIREN, investigates how structured and holistic representations can give robots the ability to interact more naturally and reliably in human environments.
Her pioneering contributions have been recognized with some of Germany’s most prestigious honors, including the Alfried Krupp Prize for Young Professors (2025) and the Emmy Noether Award (2021), as well as multiple Best Paper Awards in flagship conferences and workshops (e.g., ICRA, IROS, and RSS). She has also been named an ELLIS Scholar, AI Newcomer of the German Informatics Society, and RSS Pioneer, and has delivered keynote talks at leading international venues such as IROS and CoRL. Beyond her research, Georgia is deeply committed to community building and inclusion. As Co-Chair of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society Women in Engineering Committee (RAS-WiE) of the Robotics and Automation Society, she helped launch the IDEA Travel Grant to support diversity, and currently as Chair of RAS WiE she introduced the new WiRA Awards to highlight women’s contributions to robotics.
Mar Masulli
Mar Masulli is CEO and co-founder of BitMetrics, a Spanish Physical AI start-up that provides software-driven intelligence to bring autonomy to the physical world.
BitMetrics software enables visual perception and context awareness on automated systems to handle variability, to adapt in real time and operate reliably in unstructured environments. Whether it’s picking, placing, sorting or inspecting, BitMetrics works with clients to create vision-first, adaptive automation solutions.
Masulli previously held leadership roles at IBM, British Telecom and EY before founding BitMetrics. She is a board member of the Spanish Robotics Association and uses her platform to push for accessible, human-centred robotics.
Alona Kharchenko
Alona Kharchenko is co-founder and CTO of Devanthro, a Munich-based deep tech startup developing Robodies - humanoid robots bringing embodied AI into people’s homes. She joined the Roboy research project at TU Munich in 2015 and now leads Devanthro’s engineering team. Her team pioneered the world’s first deployment of humanoids in private homes, living with and caring for people across Germany. She has been recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list (2023) and as a Women TechEU awardee (2024).