Brooks, Rodney oral history | 102792871

Description

Born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1954, Rodney Brooks became fascinated with building computers at a young age. After completing his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Flinders University of South Australia, he arrived at Stanford in 1977, where he pursued a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence, working with advisor Thomas Binford of the hand-eye group. It was at Stanford that he met fellow student and roboticist Hans Moravec, who was working on the Stanford Cart.
After graduation in 1981 Brooks spent a brief period at CMU working with Guy Steele on LISP compilers and systems, and then spent two years as a post-doc with Tomas Lozano-Perez at MIT, before rejoining Stanford briefly as faculty in 1983, ultimately joining MIT in 1984 to focus on mobile robots. Having become disillusioned with traditional symbolic AI, it was at MIT that Brooks developed his radical behavior-based approach to robotics, which insisted that centralized world modeling and planning was not necessary for robotics. Rather, building robots like insects and coupling actions directly to sensors in a bottom-up, distributed, and layered way, which Brooks called “subsumption architecture,” would allow robots to more robustly interact with their environment and adapt to changing conditions.

Brooks published his ideas in provocatively named papers such as “Intelligence without Reason” and “Elephants Don’t Play Chess.” Brooks and his graduate students built a series of insect-like robots along these principles, before moving on to a humanoid robot named Cog.
In 1997, Brooks became the Director of the MIT AI Lab, which, though it shared a history with the Lab for Computer Science, was still institutionally separate. In 2003, Brooks led the merger of the two laboratories into the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Brooks retired from MIT in 2010 to focus on commercializing his ideas for robots into practical products.

Having already dabbled in entrepreneurship in the 1980s, in 1990 Brooks founded what would become iRobot with two former students, initially to make cheap robots for the exploration of the solar system. iRobot eventually produced the PackBot, which would be used to help in disaster zones such as 9/11 and the Fukushima nuclear power plant, as well as to disarm bombs in Iraq. iRobot’s most successful product, however, has been the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner. Brooks also founded Heartland Robotics, later renamed Rethink Robotics, in 2008 to produce industrial robots that could operate safely with humans around and would be easy to program simply by showing it how to move. Rethink was acquired in 2018. Brooks has since founded Robust.ai, making easy to use robots that can help workers in warehouses. Brooks has also served on the board of the Toyota Research Institute. Brooks has continued to be a gadfly in the AI world, writing blogs cutting through the hype of AI trends such as large language models.

Date

2023-06-02

Participants

Brooks, Rodney A., Interviewee

Hsu, Hansen, Interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA

Duration

02:03:48

Format

MOV

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

2023.0093

Artifact Details

Title

Catalog Number

Type