Brooks named first holder of Matsushita Robotics Chair

February 15, 2005

The EECS Department is pleased to announce that Professor Rodney Brooks has been named as the first recipient of a new Chair of Robotics (final name for the chair is still being negotiated). The Chair is provided through a contribution from the Matsushita Corporation, and is specifically designated for a leader in the field of robotics. It is hard to imagine a more deserving candidate than Rod.

Rod completed his Ph.D. at Stanford in 1981, and joined our faculty in 1984. He became a Full Professor in 1993, and held the Fujitsu Chair from 1996 until now.

Rod is an international leader in the field of robotics, and has dramatically reshaped the field, both technically and commercially. His research is concerned with both the engineering of intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments, and with understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots. He has published on model-based computer vision, path planning, uncertainty analysis, robot assembly, active vision, autonomous robots, micro-robots, micro-actuators, planetary exploration, representation, artificial life, humanoid robots, and compiler design. His books have been translated into Arabic, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Spanish and Japanese. Rod is a Founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004.

Outside of academia, Rod has a very visible presence in many domains. He is a co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot, one of the worlds leading robotics companies, whose products range from the Roomba vacuum cleaner to mobile robots used in combat for reconnaissance. Rod has also starred as himself in the Errol Morris movie "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control"; named for one of his scientific papers.

Rod provides leadership within MIT, serving as the Director of CSAIL. And he is a gifted teacher of subjects ranging from introductory computation, to computer architecture, to artificial intelligence, to embodied intelligence. The department is delighted to see Rod’s many accomplishments acknowledged through the Matsushita Chair.