Rodney Brooks
Co-founder and chief technical officer of Robust.AI
A roboticist who popularized behavior-based robotics and co-founded iRobot, Rethink Robotics and Robust.AI.
Biography
Rodney Brooks is an Australian roboticist and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science who popularized the actionist approach to robotics. He earned an MA in pure mathematics from Flinders University of South Australia and a PhD in computer science from Stanford in 1981, held research posts at Carnegie Mellon and MIT, and joined the MIT faculty in 1984 as Panasonic Professor of Robotics.
He directed the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1997 to 2007. His 1990 paper "Elephants Don't Play Chess" argued that robots working in human environments should build higher cognition on sensory-motor coupling with the world rather than on symbolic reasoning. He is a founder and former chief technical officer of iRobot, co-founder of Rethink Robotics, and co-founder and chief technical officer of Robust.AI, founded in 2019. He became a member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2004.
Notable contributions
Led MIT's AI and computer science laboratory
Directed the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, formerly the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, from 1997 to 2007.
Argued for behavior-based robotics
Proposed that action and behavior, rather than symbolic computation, should be the basis for robots that operate in everyday human environments, notably in the 1990 paper "Elephants Don't Play Chess".
Co-founded iRobot, Rethink Robotics and Robust.AI
Founded and served as chief technical officer of iRobot, co-founded Rethink Robotics (formerly Heartland Robotics) and later co-founded Robust.AI in 2019.