For example, Baxter’s LCD eyes will look at the spot where it’s about to reach, making its movements, from a human perspective, more predictable. Brooks explains that he gave Baxter human qualities specifically so it could integrate more easily into the human world. Unlike those machines, which need to be walled off from human workers because they can’t detect when something living is in their way, Baxter is an easily reprogrammed, 165-pound robot equipped with sonar and cameras that help it adapt to a changing environment. It doesn’t look anything like the faceless industrial robots that now dominate global manufacturing-and that’s on purpose. His latest creation, Baxter-the flagship of Rethink Robotics- is a tablet-faced robot with big, expressive, cartoon eyes and two red-and-black plastic arms. Under his watch, his students created a Kismet and a Cog, and iRobot created My Real Baby, all of which had faces and talked to you. He has created a Norman and an Allen and a Herbert and a Polly. ![]() That may be so, but Brooks has worked to make many of his robots lifelike, and has given many human names. “None of my robots have ever shat all over the floor or vomited in my mouth,” he says. He thinks about it another second and reconsiders. He throws both hands in the air and shakes them in mock surrender. Reporters would often come to my lab at MIT and say to me, ‘Oh, you’re making these robots because you don’t have a womb and you can’t have children.’ I’d say, ‘Oh yeah? So you see all these women graduate students I have in my lab? Is that why they’re here, too? Because they don’t have wombs?’” “Yeah,” Brooks says, “everyone wants to make that comparison. But unlike the Brooks in Morris’s film, he does not offer a lecture on the definition of life. So I ask him, these many years later, to describe the parallels between conceiving children and conceiving robots. He’s also the father of three grown biological children and one stepdaughter. Brooks greets me by regarding his excessively cluttered desk as if for the first time, and then asking, “Where did this mess come from? Who put all these things here?” For a brief moment, I think he’s serious.īut as we chat further, Brooks, 59, is calm and confident, a demeanor more befitting the man who some consider the father of modern robotics than the character in Morris’s film. Though Brooks is the company’s founder, he works from a cubicle in the far recesses of Rethink’s space. Most recently, he’s been vehemently warning us that in the future, we might not have enough robots to go around.Īll of which explains why, upon entering the offices of Rethink Robotics, I’m concerned that this guy might be, as they say in his native Australia, a complete nutter. ![]() In talks available online, I’ve seen him proselytizing about the oncoming robot revolution with varying degrees of ferocity. And now, with Rethink Robotics, a Fort Point–based company Brooks founded in 2008, he’s making an industrial robot named Baxter. He also cofounded iRobot, maker of the floor-cleaning Roomba and the roadside-bomb-defusing PackBot. He spent a decade as the director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, where he was one of the first scientists to give robots the ability to process data on their own. I can step back and see them as being a bag of skin full of biomolecules that are interacting according to some laws.”īrooks has come a long way-and built a lot of robots-since then. He was the scraggly haired, wild-eyed techno-topian in Cambridge director Errol Morris’s 1997 documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control-the one who claimed that his goal in robotics was “to understand life by building something lifelike.” In a series called Big Thinkers for the now-defunct TechTV, Brooks declared, “Anything that’s living is a machine. That, to this day, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey brings him to tears.Īnd that when his daughter Alice asked him for a Barbie, he instead bought her a saw and told her to make her own toys. That at age four he was called “the professor.” That at 12, he rigged an electronic ticktacktoe game together out of scrap metal, switches, wires, and light bulbs. ![]() ![]() The things I learn about Rodney Brooks before I first meet him make me nervous. Baxter, Rodney Brooks’s latest robot, regards its maker with expressive LCD eyes.
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