Rodney Brooks

Rodney Allen Brooks
Rodney Brooks in 2005
Born	(1954-12-30) December 30, 1954 Adelaide, Australia
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	Australian
Fields	Robotics
Alma mater	Stanford University Flinders University
Influenced	Andy Clark

Rodney Allen Brooks FAA (born December 30, 1954) is an Australian computer scientist and former Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1986 he has authored a series of highly influential papers which have inaugurated a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence research. Outside the scientific community Brooks is also known for his appearance in a film featuring him and his work, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. He is now the chairman and chief technical officer for Rethink Robotics (formerly Heartland Robotics) in Boston.

Scientific approach

In his 1990 paper, "Elephants Don't Play Chess", Brooks argued that interacting with the physical world is far more difficult than symbolically reasoning about it. Symbolic computational approaches to creating intelligent machines had long been the focus of AI since the days of Alan Turing, directly tracing back to the work of Gottlob Frege. Brooks focused instead on biologically-inspired robotic architectures (e.g., the subsumption architecture) that address basic perceptual and sensory motor tasks.

Products

In the late 1980s Brooks and his team introduced Allen, a robot using subsumption architecture. Currently, Brooks' work focuses on engineering intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments, and understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots.

Baxter

Main article: Baxter (robot)

Baxter, a collaborative robot which can safely and effectively interact with human workers in performance of simple industrial tasks was introduced on September 18, 2012 by Rethink Robotics. Baxter was an industrial robot selling for about $20,000 which was designed to safely interact with neighboring human workers and be programmable for the performance of simple tasks. The robot stops if it encounters a human in the way of its robotic arm and has a prominent off switch which its human partner can push if necessary. The product, intended for sale to small business, was touted as the robotic analogue of the personal computer. Costs were projected to be the equivalent of a worker making $4 an hour.

Career summary

Leadership

Brooks formerly served as Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From July 1, 2003, until June 30, 2007, he was director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; prior to that, he was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Brooks left MIT in 2008 to found a new company, Rethink Robotics (formerly Heartland Robotics), where he serves as chairman and Chief Technical Officer. He was also co-founder and Chief Technical Officer and sits on the Board of iRobot Corp.

Research

He received a degree in mathematics from Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981 under the supervision of Thomas Binford. He has held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT and a faculty position at Stanford University. He joined the faculty of MIT in 1984.

His previous research includes behavior based robotics and the *Cog project.

Corporate spin-offs

He is a founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Rethink Robotics (formerly Heartland Robotics).

Publications

The following is a list of some known noteworthy books and papers:

• Rodney Brooks (March 1986), "A robust layered control system for a mobile robot", IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation 2 (1): 14–23 
• Rodney Brooks (1989), "A Robot that Walks; Emergent Behaviors from a Carefully Evolved Network", Neural Computation 1 (2): 253–262, doi:10.1162/neco.1989.1.2.253, retrieved 24 August 2010 
• Rodney Brooks (January 1991), "Intelligence without representation", Artificial Intelligence 47 (1-3): 139–159, doi:10.1016/0004-3702(91)90053-M 
• Steels, Luc & Brooks, Rodney, ed. (1995), The Artificial Life Route to Artificial Intelligence: Building Embodied, Situated Agents, Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, ISBN 0-8058-1519-8, retrieved 24 August 2010  Alernative ISBN 0-8058-1518-X
• Brooks, Rodney A., & Maes, Pattie, ed. (1996), Artificial Life: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-52190-3, retrieved 24 August 2010 
• Rodney Brooks (1999), Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-52263-2, retrieved 24 August 2010 
• K. Warwick "Out of the Shady age: the best of robotics compilation", Review of Cambrian Intelligence: the early history of AI, by R A Brooks, Times Higher Educational Supplement, p. 32, 15 September 2000.
• Thrun, Sebastian; Brooks, Rodney Allen; Durrant-Whyte, Hugh, ed. (2007), Robotics Research: Results of the 12th International Symposium ISSR, Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, retrieved 24 August 2010 
• The Relationship Between Matter and Life (in Nature 409, pp. 409–411; 2001)
• Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (Pantheon, 2002) ISBN 0-375-42079-7

Prof. Brooks was also co-founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision and is on the editorial boards of various journals including:

• Adaptive Behavior
• Artificial Life MIT Press Journal
• Applied Artificial Intelligence
• Autonomous Robots Journal
• New Generation Computing

Memberships

• Founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
• Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE)
• In 2005 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
• Australian Academy of Science - Corresponding Member 2006

Prizes

• Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

Lectureships include:

• Cray lecturer at the University of Minnesota
• Mellon lecturer at Dartmouth College
• Hyland lecturer at Hughes
• Forsythe lecturer at Stanford University

Film appearances

• Being himself in the 1996 Errol Morris movie Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (named after one of his scientific papers)
• cyborg insects on FOXNews
• Rodney's Robot Revolution (2008)

External links

• Rethink Robotics
• TED Talks: Rodney Brooks says robots will invade our lives at TED in 2003

• Home page
• The Deep Question Interview with Rodney Brooks by Edge
• The Past and Future of Behavior Based Robotics Podcast Interview with Rodney Brooks by Talking Robots
• Intelligence Without Reason seminal criticism of Von Neumann computing architecture
• BBC article
• CSAIL Rodney A. Brooks Biography
• MIT: Cog Shop
• MIT: Rodney Brooks
• Rodney A. Brooks Biography
• Rodney A. Brooks Publications
• Rodney's Robot Revolution (2008)