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Joris De Schutter is a pioneering robotics researcher whose work has profoundly shaped the fields of robot dynamics, motion planning, and compliant robot control. Based at KU Leuven, his research spans three major areas: robot system identification, time-optimal motion planning, and force/compliant motion control. De Schutter's foundational contributions to robot identification — particularly his statistical framework for optimal excitation trajectory design and periodic excitation-based parameter estimation — have become cornerstones of the field, collectively drawing over 1,000 citations. His 2009 paper on time-optimal path tracking, which elegantly reformulates the problem as a convex optimization, has garnered 538 citations and remains a landmark reference for motion planning researchers worldwide. His early and influential work on compliant robot motion, published in 1988, established rigorous formalisms for specifying and controlling contact tasks, concepts he later synthesized through the widely adopted "task frame formalism." More recently, De Schutter extended his expertise toward human-robot cooperation and constraint-based sensor-driven task specification, demonstrating a sustained ability to evolve with the field. With thousands of citations across a career spanning four decades, his work continues to serve as essential reading for students and researchers in robotics, motion control, and autonomous manipulation.