| Rodney Brooks AKA Rodney Allen Brooks Born: 30-Dec-1954
Birthplace: Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Gender: Male
Religion: Atheist
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Scientist, Business
Party Affiliation: Democratic Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Robotics and artificial intelligence researcher 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. Father: Harry Brooks (telephone technician)
Mother: Jean Brooks (hairdresser)
Wife: Janet Sonenberg (theater teacher)
Son: Andrew Brooks
University: BS Pure Mathematics, Flinders University of South Australia (1975)
University: MS Pure Mathematics, Flinders University of South Australia (1978)
University: PhD Computer Science, Stanford University (1981)
Scholar: Carnegie Mellon University
Scholar: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Teacher: Stanford University
Professor: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT (1984-)
Administrator: Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT (1997-2007)
Heartland Robotics Founder, Chairman and CTO (2008-)
iRobot CTO (1990-2008)
Member of the Board of iRobot (1990-; as Chairman, 1990-2008)
Deere Technology Advisory Council
IJCAI Computers and Thought Award 1991
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Charter Member, 1979
Association for Computing Machinery
Australian Academy of Science
Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering
edge.org
Friends for Harry Reid
National Academy of Engineering
National Information and Communication Technology Australia
Society of Manufacturing Engineers
The Third Culture
Australian Ancestry
Naturalized US Citizen
Obama for America
FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (7-Sep-1997) · Himself
Official Website:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/
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)
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