Rodney Allen Brooks (born 30 December 1954) is an Australian

roboticist Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrat ...

Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science The Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science is made up of about 500 Australian scientists. Scientists judged by their peers to have made an exceptional contribution to knowledge in their field may be elected to Fellowship of the Academy ...

, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics. He was a Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

and former director of the

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

. He is a founder and former Chief Technical Officer of

iRobot iRobot Corporation is an American technology company that designs and builds consumer robots. It was founded in 1990 by three members of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, who designed robots for space exploration and military defense. The com ...

and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of

Rethink Robotics Rethink Robotics (formerly Heartland Robotics, Inc.) is a robotics company co-founded by Rodney Brooks and Ann Whittaker in 2008. Rethink Robotics is now part of the HAHN Group. Rethink Robotics has won awards and has been an Edison Awards finali ...

(formerly Heartland Robotics) and currently is the co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Robust.AI (founded in 2019).

Life

Brooks received a M.A. in pure mathematics from

Flinders University Flinders University is a public research university based in Adelaide, South Australia, with a footprint extending across 11 locations in South Australia and the Northern Territory. Founded in 1966, it was named in honour of British navigator ...

of South Australia. In 1981, he received a PhD in Computer Science from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

under the supervision of

Thomas Binford Thomas Oriel Binford has been a researcher in image analysis and computer vision since 1967. He developed a model-based approach to computer vision in which complex objects are represented as collections of generalized cylinders. His results are ...

. He has held research positions at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

and

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

and a faculty position at

. He joined the faculty of

in 1984. He was Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the

. He was director of the

(1997–2007), previously the "Artificial Intelligence Laboratory". In 1997, Brooks and his work were featured in the film ''

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control ''Fast, Cheap & Out of Control'' is a 1997 documentary film by filmmaker Errol Morris. Summary The film profiles four subjects with extraordinary careers: Dave Hoover, a wild-animal tamer; George Mendonça, a topiary gardener at Green Animals ...

''.Beyond computation
a talk with Rodney Brooks, Edge, 2002 Brooks became a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

in 2004 for contributions to the foundations and applications of robotics, including the establishment of consumer and hazardous environment robotics industries.

Work

Academic work

Instead of

computation Computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that follows a well-defined model (e.g., an algorithm). Mechanical or electronic devices (or, historically, people) that perform computations are known as ''computers''. An es ...

as the ultimate

conceptual metaphor In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another. An example of this is the understanding of quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "the pr ...

that helped

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

become a separate discipline in the scientific community, he proposed that ''action'' or ''

behavior Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as wel ...

'' are more appropriate to be used in robotics. Critical of applying the computational metaphor, even to the fields where the action metaphor is more appropriate, 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.

In his 1990 paper, "Elephants Don't Play Chess", Brooks argued that in order 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 primarily

sensory-motor coupling Sensory-motor coupling is the coupling or integration of the sensory system and motor system. Sensorimotor integration is not a static process. For a given stimulus, there is no one single motor command. "Neural responses at almost every stage of a ...

(action) with the environment, complemented by the proprioceptive sense which is a key component in hand–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.

Industrial work

Brooks was an entrepreneur before leaving academia to found Rethink Robotics. He was one of ten founders of

Lucid Inc. Lucid Incorporated was a Menlo Park, California, Menlo Park, California-based computer software development company. Founded by Richard P. Gabriel in 1984, it went bankrupt in 1994. History The first CEO was Tony Slocum, formerly of IntelliCorp ...

, and worked with them until the company's closure in 1993. Before Lucid closed, Brooks had founded

with former students

Colin Angle iRobot Corporation is an American technology company that designs and builds consumer robots. It was founded in 1990 by three members of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, who designed robots for space exploration and military defense. The com ...

and

Helen Greiner Helen Greiner (born December 6, 1967) is a co-founder of iRobot and former CEO of CyPhy Work, Inc., a start-up company specializing in small multi-rotor drones for the consumer, commercial and military markets. Ms Greiner is currently the CEO of ...

Robots

He experimented with off-the-shelf components, such as

Fischertechnik Fischertechnik is a brand of construction toy. It was invented by Artur Fischer and is produced by fischertechnik GmbH in Waldachtal, Germany. Fans often refer to Fischertechnik as "FT" or "ft". It is used in education for teaching about sim ...

and

Lego Lego ( , ; stylized as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of variously colored interlocking ...

, and tried to make robots self-replicate by putting together clones of themselves using the components. His robots include mini-robots used in

oil wells An oil well is a drillhole boring in Earth that is designed to bring petroleum oil hydrocarbons to the surface. Usually some natural gas is released as associated petroleum gas along with the oil. A well that is designed to produce only gas may ...

explorations without cables, the robots that searched for survivors at

Ground Zero In relation to nuclear explosions and other large bombs, ground zero (also called surface zero) is the point on the Earth's surface closest to a detonation. In the case of an explosion above the ground, ''ground zero'' is the point on the ground ...

in New York, and the robots used in medicine doing

robotic surgery Robotic surgery are types of surgical procedures that are done using robotic systems. Robotically assisted surgery was developed to try to overcome the limitations of pre-existing minimally-invasive surgical procedures and to enhance the capabil ...

. ;Allen In the late 1980s, Brooks and his team introduced

Allen Allen, Allen's or Allens may refer to: Buildings * Allen Arena, an indoor arena at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee * Allen Center, a skyscraper complex in downtown Houston, Texas * Allen Fieldhouse, an indoor sports arena on the Unive ...

, a robot using

subsumption architecture Subsumption architecture is a reactive robotic architecture heavily associated with behavior-based robotics which was very popular in the 1980s and 90s. The term was introduced by Rodney Brooks and colleagues in 1986.Brooks, R. A., "A Robust Progr ...

. Brooks' work focused on engineering intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments, and understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots. ;Baxter Introduced in 2012 by Rethink Robotics, an

industrial robot An industrial robot is a robot system used for manufacturing. Industrial robots are automated, programmable and capable of movement on three or more axes. Typical applications of robots include welding, painting, assembly, disassembly, pick a ...

named Baxter was intended as the robotic analogue of the early personal computer designed to safely interact with neighboring human workers and be programmable for the performance of simple tasks. The robot stopped if it encountered a human in the way of its robotic arm and has a prominent off switch which its human partner can push if necessary. Costs were projected to be the equivalent of a worker making $4 an hour.

Bibliography

* * * . * * Alternative * * * 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. *
The Relationship Between Matter and Life
' (in Nature 409, pp. 409–411; 2001) *''Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us'' (Pantheon, 2002) * * *Brooks contributed one chapter to ''Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it'', Packt Publishing, 2018, , by the American futurist Martin Ford.

References

External links

*
Rethink Robotics
* * *
Rodney Brooks: Why we will rely on robots
(TED2013) *
Rodney Brooks: Robots will invade our lives
(TED2003)
Home page

Interview with Rodney Brooks by ''

Edge Edge or EDGE may refer to: Technology Computing * Edge computing, a network load-balancing system * Edge device, an entry point to a computer network * Adobe Edge, a graphical development application * Microsoft Edge, a web browser developed by ...

''
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

Rodney A. Brooks Biography

Rodney's Robot Revolution (2008)Rodney Brooks on Artificial Intelligence
- EconTalk podcast interview with Rodney Brooks. Released Sep 24, 2018. {{DEFAULTSORT:Brooks, Rodney 1954 births Living people American computer scientists Artificial intelligence researchers Australian atheists Australian computer scientists Australian roboticists Carnegie Mellon University faculty Australian cognitive scientists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science Fellows of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering Flinders University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Researchers of artificial life Stanford University School of Engineering alumni The Futurist people American roboticists People from Adelaide