Famed robotics expert Rodney Brooks, the former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is retiring from academic duties at MIT as of this week. The co-founder and former chief technical officer of Bedford, MA-based iRobot will be focusing full-time on his newest company, Heartland Robotics, based in Cambridge, MA. Brooks’s new role as professor emeritus at MIT will be effective this Thursday, July 1. He is 55.
There is some question as to whether Brooks will be the youngest professor emeritus in the history of his department (electrical engineering and computer science). Reached by e-mail, Brooks confirms he is the youngest of the current crop of MIT professors who are retiring this year—at least those on a list announced at a faculty meeting last month. And current regulations at MIT say a professor must be at least 55 to achieve emeritus status, so he is probably among the youngest, at least in recent history. “It may be that come this Thursday I will be the current youngest emeritus professor at MIT, but I can’t say that for sure,” Brooks says.
Brooks is widely known for his scientific contributions to computer vision, mobile robots, humanoid robots, artificial intelligence, and artificial life. He did postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT before becoming a professor at Stanford University (where he had done his PhD in computer science) and then MIT in 1984, where he has stayed as a full-time faculty member until now. Brooks was director of the MIT AI Lab before it merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science to form CSAIL in 2003. He stepped down as director of CSAIL in June 2007 to dive deeper into science and, as it turns out, to try to create a new industry.
“I spent my career at MIT developing new ideas for how to make robots intelligent. Through iRobot I have been very successful at getting robots out in the world based on those ideas. In terms of raw numbers the majority of robots that are sold today are behavior-based, and follow the ideas I worked on in the eighties,” Brooks says. “Now I am trying to develop a new class of robots for deployment in the real world that are based on the work that my students and I did during the nineties and later.”
In September 2008, Brooks announced he was leaving iRobot (NASDAQ: [[ticker:IRBT]]), the consumer and defense robotics firm he started in 1990, to build a new company. Heartland Robotics, which is backed by Charles River Ventures and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is looking to bring intelligent, dexterous robots to industrial workplaces in order to boost productivity and revitalize U.S. manufacturing. It’s still very early, of course. But given Brooks’s recent advances in robots that can manipulate
