Rodney Brooks

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Rodney Allen Brooks
Rodney Brooks in 2005
Born	December 30, 1954 (1954-12-30) (age 54) Adelaide
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	Australian
Fields	Robotics
Institutions	MIT
Alma mater	Stanford University Flinders University

Rodney Allen Brooks (b. December 30, 1954, in Adelaide, Australia) is a professor of robotics at 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.

Scientific approach: biologically-inspired robotics

In his classic 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 sensorimotor tasks.

Currently, Brooks's work focuses on engineering intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments, and understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots.

In the late 1980s Brooks and his team introduced Allen, a robot using subsumption architecture.

Career summary

Leadership

Brooks currently serves as Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is Chief Technical Officer and sits on the Board of iRobot Corp. 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.

Research

• Degree in pure mathematics from Flinders University of South Australia
• Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University (1981)
• Research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT
• Faculty position at Stanford University
• Joined the faculty of MIT (1984)

Previous research:

• behavior based robotics
• Cog

Corporate spin-offs

• Founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot [1]
• Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Heartland Robotics

Publications

Recent books and papers:

• Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI (MIT Press, 1999) ISBN 0-262-52263-2
• 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, 15th Sept. 2000.

• 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

Other publications include papers and books in:

• model-based computer vision
• path planning
• uncertainty analysis
• robot assembly
• active vision
• autonomous robots
• behavior based AI
• micro-robots
• micro-actuators
• planetary exploration
• representation
• artificial life
• humanoid robots
• compiler design
• cyborg insects^[1]

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
• Automonous Robots Journal
• New Generation Computing

Memberships, lectureships, prizes, etc

Memberships include:

• 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 include:

• 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 include:

• Being himself in the Errol Morris movie Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (named after one of his scientific papers)

Sources

1. ^ "FOXNews.com - Scientist: Military Working on Cyborg Spy Moths". http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,276182,00.html. Retrieved 2008-06-24. 

External links

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

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Rodney Brooks

• 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)