Rodney A. Brooks

Biosketch

Rodney A. Brooks, PhD is Panasonic Professor or Robotics (emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and CTO of Robust.AI. He earned his BSc and MSc in Mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia, and his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He was a research scientist in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, then a research scientist in Artificial Intelligence at MIT, then on the Computer Science faculty, first at Stanford, and then at MIT. He was the Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and then the founding Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and of the NAS, and he is a Foreign Member of the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Computer History Museum. He won the 1981 Computers and Thought Award at IJCAI, and the 2023 IEEE Founders Medal for leadership in research and commercialization of autonomous robotics, including mobile, humanoid, service, and manufacturing robots.

Research Interests

Dr. Brooks' research has concerned a wide range of questions in computer vision, Artificial Intelligence, robotics, human-robot interaction, and Artificial Life. Additionally, since 1984, he has had a constant practice of commercializing that research through a series of six startup companies. His research has always had a strong component of looking at current research in animal and human psychology, behavior, and neuroscience, and applying those findings to develop computational approaches that provide practical algorithms for a wide range of applications. These approaches have included top-down model-based object recognition, spatial representations for building maps and planning motions in the mapped world, reactive behaviors based on a wide variety of sensory inputs, social interactions with humans, neural control of insect walking and of human upper torso motions, direct evolution of computer programs, and evolution of embodied robots. More recently he has concentrated on philosophical aspects of the origin of common assumptions about the computational nature of both Artificial Intelligence neuroscience.