Rodney Brooks
Encyclopedia
Rodney Allen Brooks is the 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 Heartland Robotics in Boston Mass.
al 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.
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.
. 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.
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
.
and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Heartland Robotics.
Prof. Brooks was also co-founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision and is on the editorial boards of various journals including:
Lectureships include:
Panasonic
Panasonic is an international brand name for Japanese electric products manufacturer Panasonic Corporation, which was formerly known as Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd...
professor of robotics
Robotics
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
. Since 1986 he has authored a series of highly influential papers which have inaugurated a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
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 Heartland Robotics in Boston Mass.
Scientific approach
In his paper, "Elephants Don't Play Chess.", Brooks argued that interacting with the physical world is far more difficult than symbolically reasoning about it. Symbolic computationSymbolic computation
Symbolic computation or algebraic computation, relates to the use of machines, such as computers, to manipulate mathematical equations and expressions in symbolic form, as opposed to manipulating the approximations of specific numerical quantities represented by those symbols...
al approaches to creating intelligent machines had long been the focus of AI since the days of Alan Turing
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...
, directly tracing back to the work of Gottlob Frege
Gottlob Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on...
. Brooks focused instead on biologically-inspired robotic architectures (e.g., the subsumption architecture
Subsumption architecture
Subsumption architecture is a reactive robot architecture heavily associated with behavior-based robotics. The term was introduced by Rodney Brooks and colleagues in 1986...
) that address basic perceptual and sensorimotor tasks.
In the late 1980s
1980s
File:1980s decade montage.png|thumb|400px|From left, clockwise: The first Space Shuttle, Columbia, lifted off in 1981; American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev eased tensions between the two superpowers, leading to the end of the Cold War; The Fall of the Berlin Wall in...
Brooks and his team introduced Allen
Allen (robot)
Allen was a robot introduced by Rodney Brooks and his team in the late 1980s, and was their first robot based on subsumption architecture. It had sonar distance and odometry onboard, and used an offboard lisp machine to simulate subsumption architecture. It resembled a footstool on wheels.Allen...
, a robot using subsumption architecture
Subsumption architecture
Subsumption architecture is a reactive robot architecture heavily associated with behavior-based robotics. The term was introduced by Rodney Brooks and colleagues in 1986...
. Currently, Brooks' work focuses on engineering intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments, and understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots.
Leadership
Brooks currently serves as Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
. He is Chief Technical Officer
Chief technical officer
A chief technology officer is an executive-level position in a company or other entity whose occupant is focused on scientific and technological issues within an organization....
and sits on the Board of iRobot
IRobot
iRobot Corporation is an American advanced technology company founded in 1990 and incorporated in Delaware in 2000, the iRobot Corporation designs robots such as an autonomous home vacuum cleaner , the Scooba that scrubs and cleans hard floors, and military and police robots, such as the PackBot...
Corp. From July 1, 2003, until June 30, 2007, he was director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...
; prior to that, he was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Research
He received a degree in pure mathematics from Flinders UniversityFlinders University
Flinders University, , is a public university in Adelaide, South Australia. Founded in 1966, it was named in honour of navigator Matthew Flinders, who explored and surveyed the South Australian coastline in the early 19th century.The university has established a reputation as a leading research...
of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
in 1981 under the supervision of Thomas Binford
Thomas Binford
Thomas Oriel Binford has been a leading researcher in image analysis and computer vision since 1967. He is known for pioneering a model-based approach to computer vision in which complex objects are represented as collections of generalized cylinders...
.
He has held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
and MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
and a faculty position at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
.
He joined the faculty of MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
in 1984.
His previous research includes behavior based robotics and the *Cog project
Cog (project)
Cog was a project at the Humanoid Robotics Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was based on the hypothesis that human-level intelligence requires gaining experience from interacting with humans, like human infants do. This in turn requires many interactions with humans over a...
.
Corporate spin-offs
He is a founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobotIRobot
iRobot Corporation is an American advanced technology company founded in 1990 and incorporated in Delaware in 2000, the iRobot Corporation designs robots such as an autonomous home vacuum cleaner , the Scooba that scrubs and cleans hard floors, and military and police robots, such as the PackBot...
and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Heartland Robotics.
Publications
The following is a list of some known noteworthy books and papers: Alernative ISBN 0-8058-1518-X- K. WarwickKevin WarwickKevin Warwick is a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom...
"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
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 BehaviorAdaptive behaviorAdaptive behavior is a type of behavior that is used to adjust to another type of behavior or situation. This is often characterized by a kind of behavior that allows an individual to change an unconstructive or disruptive behavior to something more constructive. These behaviors are most often...
- Artificial Life MIT Press Journal
- Applied Artificial Intelligence
- Autonomous Robots Journal
- New Generation Computing
Memberships
- Founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial IntelligenceAmerican Association for Artificial IntelligenceThe Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence or AAAI is an international, nonprofit, scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines...
(AAAI) - Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of ScienceAmerican Association for the Advancement of ScienceThe American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...
(AAAS) - Member of the National Academy of EngineeringNational Academy of EngineeringThe National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...
(NAE) - In 2005 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing MachineryAssociation for Computing MachineryThe Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
. - Australian Academy of ScienceAustralian Academy of ScienceThe Australian Academy of Science was founded in 1954 by a group of distinguished Australians, including Australian Fellows of the Royal Society of London. The first president was Sir Mark Oliphant. The Academy is modelled after the Royal Society and operates under a Royal Charter; as such it is...
- Corresponding Member 2006
Prizes
- Computers and Thought AwardIJCAI Computers and Thought AwardThe IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is presented by the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence , recognizing outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence. It was originally funded with royalties received from the book "Computers and Thought" , and is currently...
at the 1991 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)International Joint Conferences on Artificial IntelligenceThe International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence is a non-profit organization incorporated in the U.S. state of California. Its major activity is organizing the biennial International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the premier international gathering of artificial...
Lectureships include:
- Cray lecturer at the University of MinnesotaUniversity of MinnesotaThe University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
- Mellon lecturer at Dartmouth CollegeDartmouth CollegeDartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...
- Hyland lecturer at Hughes
- Forsythe lecturer at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
Film appearances
- Being himself in the Errol MorrisErrol MorrisErrol Mark Morris is an American director. In 2003, The Guardian put him seventh in its list of the world's 40 best directors. Also in 2003, his film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.-Early life and...
movie Fast, Cheap and Out of ControlFast, Cheap and Out of ControlFast, Cheap and Out of Control is a 1997 film by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. It profiles four subjects with extraordinary careers: a lion trainer, a topiary sculptor, a mole rat specialist, and a robot scientist....
(named after one of his scientific papers) - cyborgCyborgA cyborg is a being with both biological and artificial parts. The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline used it in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space. D. S...
insects on FOXNews
External links
- Heartland Robotics
- TED Talks: Rodney Brooks says robots will invade our lives at TEDTED (conference)TED is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading"....
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)