Rodney Brooks is an Australian roboticist, author and robotics entrepreneur, former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, perhaps most known for popularising the actionist approach to robotics.

Instead of computation as the ultimate conceptual metaphor that helped artificial intelligence become a separate discipline in the scientific community, he proposed that action or behaviour are more appropriate to be used in robotics. This is also called Behaviour-Based Systems or Behaviour-Based Robotics.

In the late 1980s, Brooks and his team introduced Allen, a robot using Subsumption Architecture, a term introduced by Brooks and his colleagues in 1986.

References#

Among Brooks' many publications, his early papers describing what was at that time an entirely different approach to a robot operating system are very interesting.

• A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot,
  Rodney A. Brooks, A.I. Memo 864, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, September 1985.
• A Robot That Walks; Emergent Behaviors from a Carefully Evolved Network (PDF)
  Rodney A. Brooks, A.I. Memo 1091, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, February 1989
• The Behavior Language; User's Guide (PDF)
  Rodney A. Brooks, A. I. Memo 1227, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, April 1990
• Intelligence Without Reason (PDF)
  Rodney Brooks, A.I. Memo No. 1293, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, April 1991
• Integrated Systems Based on Behaviors
  Rodney A. Brooks, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
• The series of articles: Future of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence:
  • The origins of “Artificial Intelligence” published on April 26, 2018.
  • Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto published on August 28, 2017.
  • The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI published on September 7, 2017.
  • Machine Learning Explained published on August 28, 2017.
  • Steps Toward Super Intelligence I, How We Got Here , published July 15, 2018.
  • Steps Toward Super Intelligence II, Beyond the Turing Test , published July 15, 2018.
  • Steps Toward Super Intelligence III, Hard Things Today , published July 15, 2018.
  • Steps Toward Super Intelligence IV, Things to Work on Now , published July 15, 2018.

Also see References page, Rodney Brooks' Publications page, or the References section on his Wikipedia page.

Links#

• Rodney Brooks home page
• RodneyBrooks.com, Robots, AI, and other stuff
• Rodney Brooks blog
• Interesting Docs, literally, his list of interesting documents and media
• Rodney Brooks on Wikipedia