The Man Who Built Robotics' Biggest Stage Gets His Due

There's a certain irony in honoring the man who, as a former IEEE president, spent years as master of ceremonies at the organization's own award galas. Fukuda received the 2025 IEEE Richard M. Emberson Award on April 24 — and by his own admission, being on the receiving end felt "very interesting." That's the kind of dry understatement you'd expect from someone who has published more than 2,000 research papers and still hasn't fully retired.

The career arc is genuinely remarkable. Fukuda started as a teenager in Japan, teaching himself to build transistor radios and steam engines during summer breaks. That hands-on obsession led him through Waseda University, the University of Tokyo, a research stint at Yale in 1973, and eventually to a government robotics lab in Tsukuba. His early practical work — designing robots to inspect oil refineries, power stations, and assembly plants, places he called "hostile environments for humans" — was funded by the chemical and utility companies that needed them. He laughs about it: the industry money kept the research alive.

His most enduring technical contribution is probably the CEBOT system, introduced in 1985. Think of it as Lego bricks that can think: autonomous robotic cells that connect, detach, and reorganize themselves into whatever structure a task demands. Fault-tolerant by design — if a cell fails, you swap it out and the system keeps running. CEBOTs now deliver medication in hospitals and sort packages in distribution centers. His "monkey robots" (brachiation robots, formally), inspired by the pendulum swing of primates, are currently inspecting high-voltage towers and searching collapsed buildings for survivors.

Then there's the institution-building, which may outlast even the hardware. In 1988 Fukuda founded IROS — the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems — with 330 attendees in Tokyo. It now draws more than 9,000 people annually and is the only robotics conference in the Nature Index database. He co-launched IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics in 1996, founded the IEEE Nanotechnology Council in 2002, and served as IEEE president in 2020, becoming the first person of Asian descent to hold that role. During COVID, he pushed IEEE to build an online learning platform that started with three courses and now offers nearly 2,000.

This is incremental news — a well-deserved award for a career already well-documented. But it's a useful reminder that the scaffolding of modern robotics research: its flagship conferences, its journals, its global community, was largely assembled by people like Fukuda, one unglamorous committee at a time. The robots get the headlines. He built the room where the robots get discussed.