Founder and CTO | Robust AI

Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT. He received his PhD in computer science from Stanford in 1981, was a research scientist at CMU and MIT, and then on the faculty at Stanford, and then MIT from 1984 until 2010. There he was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and then its successor lab, the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He was co-founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision. He has also co-founded seven startups, the first one in Palo Alto in 1984 which operated for eight years building software for AI. He was co-founder and CTO of iRobot from 1990 until 2008, finally stepping off the board in 2011. He was founder and CTO of Rethink Robotics from 2008 until 2018. Currently he is cofounder and CTO of Robust.AI.

From 2014 until 2020 Brooks was on the Visiting Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and in the past has been a long-term member of advisory boards for John Deere, GE, and Toyota Research Institute. Currently he serves as an advisor to Nokia Bell Labs, and to LG Electronics.