Revisiting Old Ideas With Modern Hardware

Rodney Brooks came to the US from Australia in 1977. His PhD (1981) work at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab was in model based computer vision in the "hand-eye group". After post-docs at CMU and MIT he joined the faculty at Stanford for one year, then joined the MIT faculty in 1984. There he formed a robotics research group that developed mobile and humanoid robots, many of which were vision-based. In 1987 he and Takeo Kanade founded the International Journal of Computer Vision. He became director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1997 and in 2003 he became the founding director of MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab). Along the way he has founded six startups, including iRobot, Rethink Robotics, and now Robust AI, which is developing a vision based collaborative mobile robot for existing cluttered warehouses.