Rodney Brooks
In plain wordsAn Australian-American roboticist who argued that intelligence grows out of acting in the world rather than abstract reasoning, and who co-founded the company behind the Roomba vacuum.
Australian-born roboticist at MIT, where he directed the AI Laboratory and then its successor, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), from 1997 to 2007. Against the sense–plan–act approach of good old-fashioned AIgood old-fashioned AI, n.: A nickname for the classic style of AI, dominant from the 1950s to the 1980s, that tried to make computers intelligent by writing knowledge and rules down by hand., he proposed the subsumption architecture (1986), in which layers of simple behaviors coupled directly to sensors run in parallel and higher layers can override lower ones; papers such as 'Elephants Don't Play Chess' (1990) and 'Intelligence without Representation' (1991) made the case for behavior-based, embodiedembodied AI, n.: AI that has a body, usually a robot and sometimes a simulated character, and learns or acts by sensing and moving in a world rather than only processing text or images. robotics. His lab built the six-legged walker Genghis and the humanoid Cog. He co-founded iRobot (1990), maker of the Roomba; Rethink Robotics (2008), maker of the collaborative robotcollaborative robot, n.: A robot designed to work safely right next to people without a safety cage, for example by moving gently and stopping at once if it bumps into someone. Baxter; and Robust.AI (2019). He is known for publicly scoring his own dated predictions each year and for skepticism about AI hype.
Related
- embodied AIembodied AI, n.: AI that has a body, usually a robot and sometimes a simulated character, and learns or acts by sensing and moving in a world rather than only processing text or images.
- roboticsrobotics, n.: The science and engineering of building robots and making them work: designing their bodies, sensors and motors, and writing the software that lets them see, plan and move safely.
- mobile robotmobile robot, n.: A robot that travels around by itself — on wheels, tracks, legs, propellers or thrusters — such as a robot vacuum, warehouse cart, delivery robot or planetary rover.
- humanoid robothumanoid robot, n.: A robot built roughly in human shape, with a head, torso, two arms and usually two legs, so that it can work in spaces and with tools designed for people.
- good old-fashioned AIgood old-fashioned AI, n.: A nickname for the classic style of AI, dominant from the 1950s to the 1980s, that tried to make computers intelligent by writing knowledge and rules down by hand.
- embodied cognitionembodied cognition, n.: The idea that thinking is not something the brain does on its own: the body, its senses and movements, and its surroundings play a real part in how we think and understand.
- Moravec's paradoxMoravec's paradox, n.: The observation that what is hard for people, like chess or algebra, is often easy for computers, while what toddlers do effortlessly, such as seeing, walking and picking things up, is very hard for machines.
Sources
- Brooks, R. A. (1986). A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot. IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation 2(1): 14–23.
- Brooks, R. A. (1991). Intelligence without Representation. Artificial Intelligence 47(1–3): 139–159.
Mentioned in
Gary MarcusGary Marcus, prop. n.: An American cognitive scientist and leading critic of deep learning, who argues that today's AI cannot reason reliably and needs to be combined with symbolic methods., MIT AI LabMIT AI Lab, prop. n.: The artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1959 and one of the birthplaces of AI and hacker culture; it is now part of MIT's computer science lab, CSAIL., Shakey the robotShakey the robot, prop. n.: A wheeled robot built at a California research institute between 1966 and 1972 that could look around, make a plan and carry it out: the first mobile robot to work out its own steps toward a goal.