Rodney A. Brooks

Rodney A. Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT. He is also co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp (nasdaq: IRBT). From 1997 - 2003 and from 2003 - 2007 he was, respectively, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab and of the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab. He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. His research is concerned with both the engineering of intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments, and with understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots. He has published papers and books in model-based computer vision, path planning, uncertainty analysis, robot assembly, active vision, autonomous robots, micro-robots, micro-actuators, planetary explora