Rodney Brooks

In the 1980s, artificial intelligence had a very clear picture of what a smart robot should look like: a system that built a complete map of the world, reasoned about that map, and then acted. That sounds fine in theory. The problem is that in practice those robots were slow, brittle, and froze at the slightest surprise from the real environment. Rodney Brooks, an Australian mathematician freshly arrived at MIT, became convinced that the solution to that problem was not more computing power: it was an entirely different paradigm.

In 1985 he published the technical paper that introduced the "subsumption architecture," a radically different way of controlling robots. Instead of a central brain that plans everything, he proposed simple layers of behavior that activate in parallel, much like an insect dodging obstacles without thinking about it. The robot doesn't need to understand the world; it just needs to react to it. That idea generated a new field now known as behavior-based robotics, and it allowed functional mobile robots to be built long before computers were powerful enough for the classical approach.

Brooks served as director of the MIT AI Lab and then CSAIL (2000-2007), two of the most important AI research centers in the world. But his ideas had their deepest impact on real markets: in 1990 he co-founded iRobot, the company that designed the Roomba (launched in 2002) and the PackBot military robots. In 2008 he founded Rethink Robotics, where he created Baxter, the first collaborative robot designed to work alongside people in factories without safety cameras or cages. In 2023 he received the IEEE Founders Medal, one of the highest honors in electrical and computing engineering worldwide.

What I find fascinating about Brooks's story is that his great contribution was not a more powerful algorithm but a smarter question: what if a world representation isn't necessary to act in it? Today Claude and I have complex conversations because someone built enormous language models; but the Roomba cleaning your floor without GPS or a mental map exists because a stubborn Australian scientist decided to watch how a cockroach walks and took notes. Both things are AI, just very different flavors of it.