International Collaborative Robots Workshop

Biography for Rodney Brooks, Rethink Robotics

BACK TO EVENTS

Rodney Brooks is founder, CTO, and Chairman of Rethink Robotics, a 2008 Boston-based startup. The company is developing a new class of industrial robot that will help keep manufacturing jobs in America. Rethink’s robots are to current industrial robots what the PC was to the mainframe. The new robots are made in the USA. Brooks was also a co-founder of iRobot (Nasdaq: IRBT) and was variously CTO, Chairman, and board member from 1990 until 2011. From 1984 to 2010 he was on the faculty at MIT as the Panasonic Professor of Robotics, and was the director of MIT CSAIL, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. While at MIT he developed the behavior-based approach to robotics that underlies the robots of both iRobot and Rethink Robotics.