Brooks, Rodney Allen

Rodney Brooks, in full Rodney Allen Brooks, (born December 30, 1954, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia), Australian computer scientist, artificial intelligence scientist, and designer of mobile autonomous robots.

While attending Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, where he received bachelor’s (1975) and master’s degrees (1978) in pure mathematics, Brooks was given access to the university’s mainframe computer for 12 hours each Sunday. This experience with computers was enough to convince Brooks to come to America to study with the artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer John McCarthy at Stanford University in California. Brooks chose a traditional AI problem for his doctoral research (1981), which he subsequently expanded and published as Model-Based Computer Vision (1984).

Attila the robot

By the time Brooks had finished his doctorate and moved to the Mobile Robotics Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984, he had become discouraged with AI research, especially with the field’s top-down approach to problem solving. The top-down approach, which dominated the field at that time, presupposes that a computer must first be supplied with an internal representation of the “essential” features of the world in which it operates—an immensely difficult framework problem for all but the very simplest tasks. Brooks turned that approach on its head, arguing that research should focus on a bottom-up approach—that is, on action and behaviour rather than on representation and function. Brooks began by building basic robots that could perform the simplest “insect-like” actions. Although no one claims that insects have sophisticated brains, they can engage in rather elaborate behaviours. Similarly, building on a few simple actions and the premise that learning comes from interacting with the real world, Brooks’s robots displayed surprisingly complex behaviour.

In 1991 Brooks cofounded the company iRobot, which produced robots for use in the home, the military, and industry. One of its most successful models was the Roomba, a small autonomous robot introduced in 2002 that could vacuum a floor. Another iRobot product, the PackBot, was used by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq to dispose of explosives.

In 1997 Brooks became director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory, where he continued to push AI in this fundamentally new direction. His influential and accessible essays were collected in Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI (1999). What initially had appeared heretical to traditional AI eventually became a new orthodoxy, complete with industrial and military applications. Brooks and his students designed robots to explore Mars as well as for more mundane tasks such as clearing minefields. He went on to the project of “raising” a robot “child” named Cog—a clever allusion to cognition and gears—that would learn from its interactions with humans. Work on Cog ended in 2004, but Cog did learn some rudimentary skills, such as recognizing animate objects.

In 2003 the MIT Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory merged with the Laboratory of Computer Science to form the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with Brooks as director. He left iRobot in 2008 to found another robotics company, Heartland Robotics (later Rethink Robotics), to build robots for use in manufacturing; the company closed in 2018. He retired from MIT in 2010.