Rodney Brooks biography
Date of birth : 1954-12-30
Date of death : -
Birthplace : Adelaide, Australia
Nationality : Australian
Category : Science and Technology
Last modified : 2011-08-17
Credited as : Scientist, professor of robotics, author, iRobot
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Australian robot designer Rodney Brooks is a founder of iRobot, a manufacturer of home and industrial robots best known for its Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, automated swimming pool cleaners, and robots that can climb stairs. He views himself as a very advanced robot, and maintains that robots must be inspired by living, breathing creatures, and engineered to deal with their environment before designers can hope for any success with more advanced tasks.
In 1989 he designed Genghis, a six-legged robot with compound eyes and motion and heat sensors that allowed the mechanized insect to move toward humans or other living things. His 1993 robot, called Cog, successfully developed the skill needed to "play" with Slinkys, and the ability to distinguish between the faces of different humans. For a decade he headed the AI laboratory at MIT, and he founded the school's Humanoid Robotics Group.
He was a key designer of PackBot, a radio-controlled robot used by the U.S. military for explosive ordnance disposal in battlefield situations, and has said that "the dangerous, the dirty, and the just plain boring jobs" are the natural realm for robotics. Brooks corresponded with Arthur C. Clarke, the late science fiction visionary who imagined the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and was a central figure in Errol Morris's 1997 documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.
Author of books:
Model-Based Computer Vision (1984, non-fiction)
Programming in Common Lisp (1985, textbook)
The Artificial Life Route to Artificial Intelligence (1995, non-fiction; with Luc Steels)
Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI (1999, non-fiction)
Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (2002, non-fiction)
