Rodney Brooks
Rodney Brooks is an Australian-born roboticist and former MIT professor who co-founded iRobot, founded Rethink Robotics, maker of the Baxter collaborative robot, and co-founded Robust.AI.
What they did and why it matters
Brooks pushed robots out of safety cages and into shared work areas, which is central to how warehouses now add automation alongside people. Rethink Robotics' Baxter, introduced in 2012, was designed to work safely next to humans and be taught tasks by demonstration rather than code. Robust.AI, which he co-founded in 2019, builds mobile robots that assist warehouse workers. The idea that robots should be safe, easy to deploy, and work with people rather than replace whole processes shapes many of today's collaborative and autonomous mobile robot products.
Related people
Sources
- Rodney Brooks (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org
- Rodney Brooks, Roboticist (MIT CSAIL) people.csail.mit.edu