Sunny talks to Emeritus Professor Rodney Brooks of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, currently CTO of Robust AI, about bottom-up and top-down approaches to robotics and AI. Brooks has been a force in robotics since the 1980s, when he first started to question the status quo of top-down, planning-based AI in favor of more biologically-based approaches. In 1990 he issued a rallying cry for a new generation of roboticists in the form of a paper called Elephants Don’t Play Chess. Since then, he not only rose to be head of the Computer Science and AI Lab at MIT, but also founded iRobot, Rethink Robotics, and Robust.AI, which have produced the Roomba, Baxter, and Carter, respectively. After the interview, discussion follows with Giulia and Ralph.
Articles and Papers
- Elephants don’t play chess
- Intelligence without reason
- Steps Toward Super Intelligence I, How We Got Here
- Cambrian intelligence: The early history of the new AI
- Rodney Brooks’ three laws of robotics
From the discussion
- Mark Tilden’s RoboSapien
- A long goodbye to [Rethink Robotics’] Baxter, a gentle giant among robots
- Slam; definition and evolution
- VIDEO: Boston Dynamics’ Atlas backflip
- Semi-autonomous control of prosthetic hands based on multimodal sensing, human grasp demonstration and user intention
Episode Credits
Producer/Writer: Sunny Bains
Co-hosts: Sunny Bains and Giulia D’Angelo
Editor: Rose Gotto
Audio Production: Taylor Marvin, Coupe Studios Music and Sound Design
Music: 3 of Diamonds by Matt Harris
For EETimes.com
This episode is produced in conjunction with EETimes. Podcast reproduced with permission.
