Rodney Brooks | |
|---|---|
 Brooks in 2021 | |
| Born | Rodney Allen Brooks (1954-12-30)30 December 1954 (age 70) |
| Alma mater | Stanford University Flinders University |
| Awards | IJCAI Computers and Thought Award |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Robotics |
| Institutions | Stanford University MIT |
| Doctoral students | Lynne Parker Maja Matarić Charles Lee Isbell Jr. Cynthia Breazeal Yoky Matsuoka Holly Yanco |
| Website | rodneybrooks |
Rodney Allen Brooks (born 30 December 1954[1][2]) is an Australianroboticist,Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing theactionist approach to robotics. He was a Panasonic Professor of Robotics at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology and former director of theMIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a founder and former Chief Technical Officer ofiRobot[3] and co-founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer ofRethink Robotics (formerly Heartland Robotics) and is the co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Robust.AI (founded in 2019).[4]
Brooks received an M.A. in pure mathematics fromFlinders University of South Australia.[5] In 1981, he received a PhD in Computer Science fromStanford University under the supervision ofThomas Binford.[6] He has held research positions atCarnegie Mellon University andMIT and a faculty position atStanford University. He joined theMIT faculty in 1984. He was Panasonic Professor of Robotics at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. He was director of theMIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1997–2007), previously the "Artificial Intelligence Laboratory".
In 1997, Brooks and his work were featured in the filmFast, Cheap & Out of Control.[7]
Brooks became a member of theNational Academy of Engineering in 2004 for contributions to the foundations and applications of robotics, including establishing consumer and hazardous environment robotics industries.[8]
Instead ofcomputation as the ultimateconceptual metaphor that helpedartificial intelligence become a separate discipline in the scientific community, he proposed thataction orbehavior is more appropriate to be used in robotics. Critical of applying the computational metaphor, even to the fields where the action metaphor is more relevant, he wrote in 2008 that:
Some of my colleagues have managed to recast Pluto's orbital behavior as the body itself carrying out computations on forces that apply to it. I think we are perhaps better off using Newtonian mechanics (with a little Einstein thrown in) to understand and predict the orbits of planets and others. It is so much simpler.[9]
In his 1990 paper, "Elephants Don't Play Chess",[10] Brooks argued that for robots to accomplish everyday tasks in an environment shared by humans, their higher cognitive abilities, including abstract thinking emulated by symbolic reasoning, need to be based on the primarilysensory-motor coupling (action) with the environment, complemented by theproprioceptive sense which is a critical component inhand–eye coordination, pointing out that:
Over time there's been a realization that vision, sound-processing, and early language are maybe the keys to how our brain is organized.[7]
Brooks was an entrepreneur before leaving academia to found Rethink Robotics. He was one of ten founders ofLucid Inc., and worked with them until the company's closure in 1993.[citation needed] Before Lucid closed, Brooks had foundediRobot with former studentsColin Angle andHelen Greiner.
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He experimented with off-the-shelf components, such asFischertechnik andLego, and tried to make robots self-replicate by putting together clones of themselves using the components. His robots include mini-robots used inoil wells explorations without cables, the robots that searched for survivors atGround Zero in New York, and the robots used in medicine doingrobotic surgery.[7]
In the late 1980s, Brooks and his team introducedAllen, a robot usingsubsumption architecture. As of 2012[update] Brooks' work focused on engineering intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments and understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots.[citation needed]
Introduced in 2012 by Rethink Robotics, anindustrial robot named Baxter was intended as the robotic analogue of theearly personal computer designed to safely interact with neighbouring 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 that its human partner can push if necessary. Costs were projected to be the equivalent of a worker making $4 an hour.[11]
In 2024, Robust.AI introduced Carter, a mobile robot.[12]
In June 2024, Brooks said that humans overestimategenerative artificial intelligence's abilities.[13]
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