Rodney Brooks has worked in AI and robotics for over fifty years. He had a full stack academic career at Stanford and MIT, eventually becoming the founding Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Brooks and his students built the first mobile robots that moved among people and at human speeds, and then the first humanoid robots that used AI computer vision and simple speech understanding to interact with people.
At the same time, he cofounded and led technology development at a series of AI and robotics companies starting with an AI software company in Palo Alto in 1984 that supported the first generation of deployed AI systems. His later companies have delivered tens of millions of robots (Roombas) into people’s homes, thousands of ground robots to the US military in Iraq, and thousands of upper torso humanoid robots to factories across the world.
Today, his latest company Robust.AI is deploying human-centered intelligent powered carts to fulfillment centers and factories. Rather than people pushing simple carts around, now AI-laden carts move and track goods, and let people handle more productive and less back-breaking work. Before too long every pushcart in the world will be an AI supercomputer on wheels, at the service of nearby workers.
Robotics has evolved from a promising technology into a critical business tool across manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, agriculture, defense, and beyond. As RoboBusiness marks its 20th anniversary, industry leaders reflect on the breakthroughs that defined the past two decades and explore the technologies, markets, opportunities, and challenges that will shape the next twenty years.
