Rodney Brooks

Rodney Allen Brooks ( born December 30, 1954 in Adelaide ) is an Australian computer scientist and cognitive scientist.

Life

After studying mathematics at Flinders University Rodney Brooks in 1981 filed his PhD in computer science at Stanford University. His research focuses on the one hand, the design simple but intelligent robots that can move freely in dynamic and complex environments, and on the other hand in the study of complex human intelligence by the design of humanoid robots. It is thus a classic representative of embodied artificial intelligence ( Embodiment ).

In addition to his teaching and authorship Brooks was, inter alia, Co-founder of the company Heartland Robotics and iRobot. From 1997 to 2007 he was the director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ( CSAIL ) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Subsumption architecture

Rodney Brooks ' approach to building robots that can move flexibly in changing environments, is the division of behavioral repertoire in many parallel calculated patterns, each of which is adequate automatically selected. Rather than in a serial manner different calculation blocks to be connected in series (perception, cognition, action), the robot does not construct representation of its environment, but is immediately after its sensor data. For each behavior pattern, only a fraction of the incoming sensor data, each relevant, which greatly simplifies the calculation. The selection of the actually exported behavior is determined by the sensor data, not between self-perception (eg battery status) and perception of the world is distinguished. Reaches a pattern its activation threshold, it suppresses the execution of all the other patterns. Such an architecture allows real-time response, but is not capable of learning.

Awards (selection)

Brooks is a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, member of the National Academy of Engineering, a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of Science and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery.

In 1997, he played himself in Errol Morris ' film Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, after his paper Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion is named of the solar system itself

Works

  • A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot ( PDF file, 1.57 MB) MIT AI Lab Memo 864, september 1985.
  • Human machines. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-15877-5.
  • LISP - Programming in Common Lisp. R. Oldenbbourg Verlag, Munich, 1987. ISBN 3-486-20269-3
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