Textbook of AI

1954–, Roboticist, AI researcher

Rodney Allen Brooks is an Australian-American roboticist whose 1986 paper A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot introduced the subsumption architecture, a layered control architecture in which higher-level behaviours subsume (override) lower-level ones, with no central representation of the world or central reasoner. The 1991 essay Intelligence Without Representation articulated the philosophical position: real-world intelligent behaviour is best produced by tightly coupling perception to action through specialised reactive systems, not by manipulating internal models.

Brooks's robots, Allen, Herbert, Genghis the six-legged walker, Cog the humanoid, were among the first to interact robustly with cluttered real-world environments. The behaviour-based tradition Brooks founded influenced an entire generation of robotics. He directed the MIT AI Lab from 1997 to 2003, after which he founded iRobot (the Roomba) and later Rethink Robotics (Baxter and Sawyer collaborative robots).

Brooks has been an outspoken critic of inflated AI hype and is co-author of an annual predictions for AI/robotics blog post that scorecards his own predictions, a useful corrective to the typical AI commentary cycle.