Dr. Rodney Brooks

Dr. Rodney Brooks
iRobot Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
Professor Rodney A. Brooks
Rodney Brooks is the principal architect of iRobot’s innovative proprietary software technology. He is also the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT and the Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. His principal fields of interest are robotics, computer vision, and artificial [...]

Ethics of Autonomous Military Robots

Ronald C. Arkin, “Governing Lethal Behavior: Embedding Ethics in a Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive Robot Architecture,” Technical Report GIT-GVU-07011. Fascinating (and long: 117-page) paper on ethical implications of robots in war.
[From Bruce Schneier's blog]
Readers may also be interested in a more recent publication from Georgia Tech, “Lethality and Autonomous Systems: Survey Design and Results” (PDF format), a [...]

Domo arigato, Mr Roboto

The Economist
SHINTOISM is an animist religion. Its adherents believe that all things, from lampshades to leopards, can possess living spirits. This fact is often trotted out to explain Japan’s fascination with robots. And where America’s mechanical beings tend to menace the human race (think HAL and Terminator), Japan’s are more often its saviours (as Astro [...]

The fly’s a spy

The Economist
JUST below a half-opened garage door a tiny device can be seen at the feet of someone lurking in the shadows. It looks like a blue dragonfly. Then its miniature wings begin to flap as it slips under the door and darts along the street. After rising through the air it stops to hover [...]

A challenge, eh?

The Economist
The competition to make a working robot vehicle has moved from the desert to the mean city streets
ONLY three years ago the world’s most advanced robotic cars struggled to make their way around even basic obstacles such as large rocks and potholes in the road. Despite millions of dollars’ worth of high-tech equipment, the [...]

Rise of the machines

The Economist
EVER since Karol Capek, a Czech playwright, used the term in the early 1920s to describe artificial people, robots have usually appeared in popular culture with human characteristics and made by big companies. There was the Model B-9 Environmental Control Robot in “Lost in Space”; Rosie, the robot maid in “The Jetsons”; C-3PO in [...]

NTSB cites wide range of safety issues in first investigation on unmanned aircraft accident

National Transportation Safety Board
Washington, DC – As a result of its first investigation of an accident involving an unmanned aircraft (UA), the National Transportation Safety Board today issued a total of 22 safety recommendations to address what NTSB Chairman Mark V. Rosenker said were “a wide range of safety issues involving the civilian use [...]