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Rodney Brooks Facts & Worksheets

Rodney Brooks is an Australian roboticist and an emeritus professor of Robotics at MIT. He is one of the founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the iRobot Corporation.

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Rodney Brooks is an Australian roboticist and an emeritus professor of Robotics at MIT. He is one of the founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the iRobot Corporation. He is greatly famous for popularizing robotics by the actionist approach.

See the fact file below for more information on the Rodney Brooks or alternatively, you can download our 23-page Rodney Brooks worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

EARLY CAREER AND CAREER

  • Rodney Allen Brooks was born on December 30, 1954, in Adelaide, South Australia. Brooks is an Australian-American computer scientist and artificial intelligence scientist, and created the mobile autonomous robot (this is known as an auto robot that performs certain behaviors or tasks with a high degree of autonomy).
  • Brooks attended Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, for his bachelor’s degree in 1975 and master’s degree in mathematics in 1978. While studying at the university, he was given access to the university’s mainframe computers (computers used by large organizations that handle critical applications and bulk data processing) for 12 hours every Sunday.

BIOGRAPHY AND EARLY CAREER

  • Brooks’s experience with handling mainframe computers convinced him that he had enough knowledge to study Artificial Intelligence developed by John McCarthy at Stanford University in California, USA.
  • For Brooks’s doctoral research in 1981, he decided to explore the traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) problem. He later on expanded and published Model-Based Computer Vision in 1984.
  • Model-Based Computer Vision recognizes the object model defined to capture the object’s geometrical and appearance properties at the right level of specification.

THE BEGINNING OF BUILDING ROBOTS

  • Brooks finished his doctorate and moved to the Mobile Robotics Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. By this time, he became discouraged about AI research because of its top-down approach to solving problems.
  • A top-down approach is an approach that requires a computer to be supplied with an internal representation of the “essential” features in which it operates first. It includes a challenging framework problem for all but the very simplest tasks.
  • The approach dominated the AI field at that time. However, Brooks did not agree with the approach and argued that research must focus on the bottom-up approach. The bottom-up approach is about action and behavior rather than the representation and its functions.
  • Brooks then started building basic robots that could perform the simplest “insect-like” actions. Although insects do not have sophisticated brains, they can engage in rather elaborate behaviors.
  • Additionally, it engages in a few simple actions, and with the hypothesis that learning comes from interacting with the real world, Brooks’s robots displayed unpredicted complex behavior.
  • Later on, Brooks was one of the co-founders of the company iRobot in 1991. The company produced robots that are useful in the home, the military, and industry.
  • “Roomba” is one of the successful models of iRobot. It is a small autonomous robot that vacuums floors. It was introduced in 2002. Another robot was developed that was used for the military. US soldiers used the “PackBot” in disposing of explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

DIRECTOR OF MIT RESEARCH LABORATORY

  • Brooks was appointed as the director of the MIT Artificial intelligence Research Laboratory in 1997. He also used this opportunity to continue exploring Artificial Intelligence in a fundamentally new direction.
  • Brooks also wrote several influential and accessible essays. His essays were collected in Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI in 1999. The traditional AI that initially appeared as heretical eventually became the new orthodoxy, with industrial and military applications.
  • Together with his students, Brooks developed and designed robots that would explore Mars and do more human tasks such as clearing minefields.
  • Brooks then began developing a project about “raising” a robot “child” that would learn things from its interactions with humans. It was named “Cog”, which is a clever link to cognition and gears.
  • The project ended in 2004. However, Cog learned some skills, such as recognizing animated objects.

LATER IN LIFE

  • The MIT Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory integrated with the Laboratory of Computer Science. They formed the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with Brooks as the Director.
  • In 2008, Brooks left iRobot to found other robotics companies. He founded Heartland Robotics, later renamed Rethink Robotics. The company focuses on building robots that are significant in the manufacturing industry.
  • Rethink Robots introduced an industrial robot named Baxter in 2012. It was  designed to safely interact with neighboring human workers and be programmable to perform simple tasks. However, the company was closed in 2018.

OTHER INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT BROOKS

  • Brooks was a founding fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He was also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also became a part of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2005, and a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science in 2006.
  • Brooks was awarded the Computers and Thought Award in the 1991 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He also won the IEEE Robotics and Automation Award in 2015.
  • Brooks has also appeared in many TV series and documentaries talk about artificial intelligence, computers, robots, and machinery.
  • These include The Machine in 2019, Rodney’s Robot Revolution in 2008, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control in 1997, and many more.

Rodney Brooks Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about the Rodney Brooks across 23 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Rodney Brooks worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Rodney Brooks who is an Australian roboticist and an emeritus professor of Robotics at MIT. He is one of the founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the iRobot Corporation. He is greatly famous for popularizing robotics by the actionist approach.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

  • Rodney Brooks Facts
  • A Roboticist’s Life
  • Cog and Baxter
  • Brooks’s Inquiry
  • Brooks’s Timeline
  • Top-Down or Bottom-Up?
  • Brooks’s Achievements
  • Replacing Humans?
  • Life Filled with Robots
  • Brooks’s Tech Lingo
  • Your Own Robot

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Use With Any Curriculum

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