Rodney Brooks

Biography

Dr. Rodney Brooks is Founder, Chairman and CTO of Heartland Robotics, Inc. He is also a Founder, Board Member and former CTO (1991 - 2008) of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT) and the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (on leave) at MIT. Dr. Brooks is the former Director (1997 - 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelliigence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He has pubished many papers in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life. He is the former co-founder and chief technical officer of iRobot, which gained fame as the producers of Roomba vacuuming robot as well as other robotic devices. Currently, he is co-founder and chief technical officer of Rethink Robotics.

Required Readings

Brooks, Rodney. "How to Build Complete Creatures Rather than Isolated Cognitive Simulators," in Kurt Van Lehn (ed.) Architectures for Intelligence: The 22nd Carnegie Mellon Symposium on Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.

Brooks, Rodney. "Humanoid Robotics", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 45, No. 3, March 2002, 33 –38. (Consult the Library Database: ACM Digital Library)

Supplemental Readings

Brooks, Rodney et al. "The Cog Project: Building a Humanoid Robot." in C. Nehaniv, ed., Computation for Metaphors, Analogy and Agents, Vol. 1562 of Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer-Verlag, 1998.

Brooks, Rodney. "New Approaches to Robotics," Science (253), September 1991, 1227–1232.

Brooks, Rodney. "The Next 50 Years", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 51, No. 1, January 2008, 63 –64. (Consult the Library Database: ACM Digital Library)

Brooks, Rodney et al. "Human Robots: A New Kind of Tool," IEEE Intelligent Systems and Their Applications: Special Issue on Humanoid Robotics, Vol. 15, No. 4, July/August 2000, 25--31.

Brooks, Rodney. "I, Rodney Brooks, Am a Robot." IEEE Spectrum (June 2008), Vol. 45, No. 6, 68-71.

Review Questions

1. Brooks argues that subsumption architecture is an antidote to traditional AI, which he believes has reached a dead end for the goal of creating autonomous, intelligent agents. What is subsumption architecture and how does it contrast with traditional AI systems? Explain.
   
   
2. Why is it important for Brooks to design and build a humanoid robot rather than machines that perform various kinds of useful tasks? Explain.