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MHT Emerging Technologies Forum: Robotics
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Who he is: CTO of Heartland Robotics Inc., which aims to do for manual labor with robotics what the PC did for office work.
Track record: Co-founded consumer and military robot maker iRobot Corp. with Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, who were students of his at MIT, where Brooks was director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Education: Degree in pure mathematics from Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia); Ph.D., Stanford University.
Long ago and far away: Like a lot of stories involving mad scientists and robots, Rodney Brooks’ starts with nuclear explosions. “There was lots of radioactive stuff wafting around when I was being conceived.” That joke might explain something about a guy whose biography on MIT’s website includes a photo of a robot using a banana as a telephone. Brooks was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in the 1950s — around the time Great Britain was testing nuclear weapons in the surrounding desert. Brooks built simple computers in Adelaide when he was about 8 or 9 years old. “I hadn’t seen a real computer. There weren’t many around, but I had some books.” He built his first robot when he was 16 — a 10-inch disc that moved toward light and would back up if it bumped something. But he laughs at the idea of comparing it to the Roomba. “I think anyone who worked on the Roomba would be really insulted by that.”
Circuitous route to Kendall Square: Brooks was rejected by MIT when he applied for grad school, but he was accepted by Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University. Not being familiar with the geography of the United States, he went to a library and checked an atlas. He chose Stanford: “California looked closer to Australia than Pennsylvania did.” Brooks came to the U.S. in 1977 and ended up at MIT as a post-doctoral student in 1981, becoming a faculty member in 1984.
Accomplishments: Aside from his three children, Brooks said he’s most proud of developing the behavioral model of robotics, which has since become widely adopted. He was in Thailand visiting his then-wife’s family. They didn’t speak English, and he didn’t speak Thai. There was no Internet at the time, and no TV where he was. He was sitting, watching insects when it occurred to him — the insects were maneuvering pretty well with simple nervous systems. It led him to believe that he could build biologically-inspired robots.
Special pride: Brooks said he’s gratified by the time he spent as director of CSAIL, both mentoring students there and working on the building of the Ray and Maria Stata Center, which opened in 2004. He’s also proud of the U.S. military’s use of iRobot’s PackBot, which can dispose of land mines and perform other dangerous tasks, and of the slow creep of robots into everyday life. For example, iRobot’s Roomba occupies the bottom shelf of the vacuum section of Target, next to brands that won’t vacuum anything by themselves.
Mentors: Former AI Lab director Patrick Winston, noted MIT computer scientist Michael Dertouzos and Robert A. Brown, a former MIT provost and current president of Boston University. MIT AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, a technology consultant on the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” inspired him in his teenage years. With its flat-panel displays and graphical interfaces, Brooks said “2001” is one of the few futuristic movies of the period that have aged well. “That’s how I found out about MIT.”
Helen Greiner, on Rodney Brooks:
Rod Brooks was Helen Greiner’s academic adviser at MIT, and he was not good at it. Greiner, iRobot co-founder, is current CEO of The Droid Works Inc. and was an MHT All-Star in 2007.
As an adviser: “He had bigger issues on his plate, like the future of robotics...He basically just told me to go look it up (laughing).”
On getting the job done: Greiner recalled an incident working at 3 a.m. on a robot that absolutely had to ship the following morning — and a stray wire somewhere was keeping the robot from working. It could have been a depressing situation for the company. “But with Rod and Colin (Angle), it’s like, ‘OK, let’s get some food at Burger King, we’ll figure it out.’ ”
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