Rodney Brooks

Rodney Allen Brooks is an Australian roboticist, born in Adelaide in 1954, credited with popularizing the behavior-based approach to robotics that emphasizes direct interaction between a robot and its environment over traditional, heavily computational models of robot control. After earning a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1981, he joined the MIT faculty in 1984, later serving as Panasonic Professor of Robotics and directing the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1997 to 2007. He built influential robots including Allen, which demonstrated his subsumption architecture for real-time robot control, and his widely cited 1990 paper Elephants Don't Play Chess challenged prevailing assumptions in artificial intelligence research. He went on to co-found three robotics companies, iRobot, Rethink Robotics, whose Baxter robot was designed to work safely alongside humans on factory floors, and Robust.AI in 2019, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004.