Brooks became a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for contributions to the foundations and applications of robotics, including establishing consumer and hazardous environment robotics industries.[8]
Work
Academic work
Rodney Brooks in 2005
Instead of computation as the ultimate conceptual metaphor that helped artificial intelligence become a separate discipline in the scientific community, he proposed that action or behavior are more appropriate to be used in robotics. Critical of applying the computational metaphor, even to the fields where the action metaphor is more relevant, he wrote in 2008 that:
Some of my colleagues have managed to recast Pluto's orbital behavior as the body itself carrying out computations on forces that apply to it. I think we are perhaps better off using Newtonian mechanics (with a little Einstein thrown in) to understand and predict the orbits of planets and others. It is so much simpler.[9]
In his 1990 paper, "Elephants Don't Play Chess",[10] Brooks argued that for robots to accomplish everyday tasks in an environment shared by humans, their higher cognitive abilities, including abstract thinking emulated by symbolic reasoning, need to be based on the primarily sensory-motor coupling (action) with the environment, complemented by the proprioceptive sense which is a critical component in hand–eye coordination, pointing out that:
Over time there's been a realization that vision, sound-processing, and early language are maybe the keys to how our brain is organized.[7]
Industrial work
Brooks was an entrepreneur before leaving academia to found Rethink Robotics. He was one of ten founders of Lucid Inc., and worked with them until the company's closure in 1993.[citation needed] Before Lucid closed, Brooks had founded iRobot with former students Colin Angle and Helen Greiner.
Robots
Robot at Rethink Robotics, 2013. Brooks is at the right in the lineup behind the robot. At left is Steve Jurvetson, the photographer.
He experimented with off-the-shelf components, such as Fischertechnik and Lego, and tried to make robots self-replicate by putting together clones of themselves using the components. His robots include mini-robots used in oil wells explorations without cables, the robots that searched for survivors at Ground Zero in New York, and the robots used in medicine doing robotic surgery.[7]
Allen
In the late 1980s, Brooks and his team introduced Allen, a robot using subsumption architecture. As of 2012[update] Brooks' work focused on engineering intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments and understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots.[citation needed]
Baxter
Introduced in 2012 by Rethink Robotics, an industrial robot named Baxter was intended as the robotic analogue of the early personal computer designed to safely interact with neighbouring human workers and be programmable for the performance of simple tasks. The robot stops if it encounters a human in the way of its robotic arm and has a prominent off switch that its human partner can push if necessary. Costs were projected to be the equivalent of a worker making $4 an hour.[11]
Brooks, Rodney (March 1986). "A robust layered control system for a mobile robot". IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation. 2 (1): 14–23. doi:10.1109/jra.1986.1087032. hdl:1721.1/6432. S2CID 10542804.
Rodney Brooks (1989), "A Robot that Walks; Emergent Behaviors from a Carefully Evolved Network" (PDF), Neural Computation, 1 (2): 253–262, doi:10.1162/neco.1989.1.2.253, hdl:1721.1/6500, S2CID 33987248, retrieved 24 August 2010
Brooks, Rodney (1990), "Elephants Don't Play Chess" (PDF), Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 6 (1–2): 3–15, CiteSeerX10.1.1.588.7539, doi:10.1016/S0921-8890(05)80025-9, retrieved 30 August 2007.
Steels, Luc; Brooks, Rodney, eds. (1995), The Artificial Life Route to Artificial Intelligence: Building Embodied, Situated Agents, Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, ISBN 978-0-8058-1519-1, retrieved 24 August 2010 Alternative ISBN 0-8058-1518-X
Brooks, Rodney A.; Maes, Pattie, eds. (1996), Artificial Life: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-262-52190-1, retrieved 24 August 2010
Rodney Brooks (1999), Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI, MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-262-52263-2, retrieved 24 August 2010
K. Warwick "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 Education Supplement, p. 32, 15 September 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
Thrun, Sebastian; Brooks, Rodney Allen; Durrant-Whyte, Hugh, eds. (2007), Robotics Research: Results of the 12th International Symposium ISSR, Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 9783540481102, retrieved 24 August 2010
Brooks, Rodney (May–June 2013). "Robots at work : towards a smarter factory". The Futurist. 47 (3): 24–27.
Brooks contributed one chapter to Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it, Packt Publishing, 2018, ISBN 978-1-78-913151-2, by the American futurist Martin Ford.[13]
^ a b cBeyond computation: a talk with Rodney Brooks, Edge, 2002
^"NAE website-Dr Rodney A. Brooks". NAE. Retrieved 5 September 2021.
^Brooks, Rodney (2008). "Computation as the Ultimate Metaphor ("What have you changed your mind about?")". www.edge.org. Retrieved 31 October 2021.
^Brooks, RA (1990). "Elephants don't play chess" (PDF). Robotics and Autonomous Systems. 6 (1–2): 139–159. CiteSeerX10.1.1.588.7539. doi:10.1016/s0921-8890(05)80025-9.
^John Markoff (18 September 2012). "A Robot With a Reassuring Touch". The New York Times. Retrieved 18 September 2012.
^Miller, Ron (29 June 2024). "MIT robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks thinks people are vastly overestimating generative AI". Toggle the table of contents TechCrunch. Retrieved 1 July 2024.
^Falcon, William (30 November 2018). "This Is The Future Of AI According To 23 World-Leading AI Experts". Forbes. Retrieved 20 March 2019.
External links
Media related to Rodney Brooks at Wikimedia Commons
Rethink Robotics
Rodney Brooks at IMDb
Rodney Brooks at TED
Rodney Brooks: Why we will rely on robots (TED2013)
Rodney Brooks: Robots will invade our lives (TED2003)
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
Rodney A. Brooks Biography
Rodney A. Brooks Publications
Rodney's Robot Revolution (2008)
Rodney Brooks on Artificial Intelligence - EconTalk podcast interview with Rodney Brooks. Released Sep 24, 2018.