Rodney Brooks

Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT, and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received his PhD in computer science from Stanford in 1981, and since then has been an academic and a founder of multiple companies. Along with two students he was cofounder of iRobot (make of the Roomba) in 1990 (NASDAQ: IRBT), and then in 2008 he founded Rethink Robotics which produces collaborative robots for factories around the world–unlike traditional robots these new robots are safe for humans to interact with, and they are not programmed, but rather ordinary factory workers train them to do new tasks. Rodney Brooks is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the Australian Academy of Science, The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Toyota Research Institute, and a member of the Visiting Committee of the NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology).

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