Rodney A. Brooks

AAAI Conference 1998 Conference Paper

Alternative Essences of Intelligence

• Rodney A. Brooks
• Robert Irie
• Matthew Marjanovic

We present a novel methodology for building humanlike artificially intelligent systems. We take as a model the only existing systems which are universally accepted as intelligent: humans. We emphasize building intelligent systems which are not masters of a single domain, but, like humans, are adept at performing a variety of complex tasks in the real world. Using evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience, we suggest four alternative essences of intelligence to those held by classical AI. These are the parallel themes of development, social interaction, embodiment, and integration. Following a methodology based on these themes, we have built a physical humanoid robot. In this paper we present our methodology and the insights it affords for facilitating learning, simplifying the computation underlying rich behavior, and building systems that can scale to more complex tasks in more challenging environments.

YNIMG Journal 1998 Journal Article

Effects of DOPA Medication on Dopamine and Serotonin Receptor Binding

• Albert Gjedde
• Katalin Borbely
• Rodney A. Brooks
• Dean F. Wong

IROS Conference 1997 Conference Paper

Visually-guided obstacle avoidance in unstructured environments

• Liana M. Lorigo
• Rodney A. Brooks
• W. E. L. Grimsou

This paper presents an autonomous vision-based obstacle avoidance system. The system consists of three independent vision modules for obstacle detection, each of which is computationally simple and uses a different criterion for detection purposes. These criteria are based on brightness gradients, RGB (red, green, blue) color, and HSV (hue, saturation, value) color, respectively. Selection of which modules are used to command the robot proceeds exclusively from the outputs of the modules themselves. The system is implemented on a small monocular mobile robot and uses very lour resolution images. It has been tested for over 200 hours in diverse environments.

IROS Conference 1996 Conference Paper

Behavior-based humanoid robotics

• Rodney A. Brooks

Building humanoid robots that can interact with people in the same way as people interact with people provides a new set of challenges for robotics and artificial intelligence. We report here on extending the behavior-based approach to building a human behavior level humanoid robot.

AIJ Journal 1991 Journal Article

Intelligence without representation

• Rodney A. Brooks

Artificial intelligence research has foundered on the issue of representation. When intelligence is approached in an incremental manner, with strict reliance on interfacing to the real world through perception and action, reliance on representation disappears. In this paper we outline our approach to incrementally building complete intelligent Creatures. The fundamental decomposition of the intelligent system is not into independent information processing units which must interface with each other via representations. Instead, the intelligent system is decomposed into independent and parallel activity producers which all interface directly to the world through perception and action, rather than interface to each other particularly much. The notions of central and peripheral systems evaporate—everything is both central and peripheral. Based on these principles we have built a very successful series of mobile robots which operate without supervision as Creatures in standard office environments.

IROS Conference 1990 Conference Paper

Lunar base construction robots

• Rodney A. Brooks
• Pattie Maes
• Maja J. Mataric
• Grinell More

President Bush called for the construction of a permanently manned lunar base. All serious plans for such a base require the use of lunar soil as shielding material against the Sun's radiation. Plans rely on the use of a large bulldozer-like vehicle to be driven by an astronaut, either locally or under teleoperation control. Brooks and Flynn (89) proposed an alternate approach to a single large and complex robot based on many small totally autonomous robots which trade off time to achieve the task with lowered complexity and cost of the system. In this paper the authors describe an experimental system they are building with 20 small bulldozers, which work without explicit coordination or communication, but nevertheless cooperate to achieve tasks that will be useful in building a manned lunar base. In particular the authors believe such tasks as digging out trenches in which the habitation units will be placed, stockpiling a supply of loose lunar soil to cover the habitation units, and actually covering them when delivered, can all be carried out by such small bulldozers.

IROS Conference 1990 Conference Paper

Small planetary rovers

• Colin M. Angle
• Rodney A. Brooks

The authors argue that small rovers on the order of 1 to 2 kg are suitable for planetary exploration. Not only are they extremely cost effective but they also enable a number of new possibilities for scientific objectives. The authors describe their Attila robots which are prototypes for planetary rovers at the larger end of the scale (1. 6 kg). The robots have 24 actuators and over 150 sensors, all connected via a local network to 11 onboard computers.

ICRA Conference 1989 Conference Paper

A robot that walks; emergent behaviors from a carefully evolved network

• Rodney A. Brooks

The author describes a carefully designed series of networks, each one being a strict augmentation of the previous one, which control a six-legged walking machine capable of walking over rough terrain and following a person passively sensed in the infrared spectrum. As the completely decentralized networks are augmented, the robot's performance and behavior repertoire demonstrably improve. The rationale for such demonstrations is that they can help identify requirements for automatically building massive networks to carry out complex sensory-motor tasks. The experiments with an actual robot ensure that an essence reality is maintained and that no critical disabling problems have been ignored. The present work is based on the drawing of analogies between evolution in the animal world and robotic evaluation. >

IROS Conference 1989 Conference Paper

Building Robots: Expectations and Experiences

• Anita M. Flynn
• Rodney A. Brooks

IROS Conference 1989 Conference Paper

Robot Beings

• Rodney A. Brooks
• Anita M. Flynn

ICRA Conference 1988 Conference Paper

MIT mobile robots-what's next?

• Anita M. Flynn
• Rodney A. Brooks

The MIT mobile robot project began in January of 1985 with the objective of building machines that could operate autonomously and robustly in dynamically changing environments. Five working robots, each progressively more intelligent and sophisticated, are now available. These robots are reviewed, focusing on their innovative aspects. These include novel ideas in the areas of control systems, sensors, actuators, power supplies, and power processing. Perspectives on mobile robotics are outlined, including objectives, experiences, mistakes, and future plans. >

ICRA Conference 1987 Conference Paper

A hardware retargetable distributed layered architecture for mobile robot control

• Rodney A. Brooks

The MIT mobile robot project has adopted a layered approach to building robust control systems for autonomous mobile robots. We build a complete control system for a very simple task achieving behavior for our robots, then lay additional complete control systems on top of it to achieve higher level tasks. We have this architecture operational on three completely different types of hardware (a general purpose computer, a special purpose multi-processor, and processor-less logic network) and are now working on a fourth, by way of a special purpose silicon compiler for it. Exactly the same high level language specification files are used on three of these four architectures. The control architect is thus freed from even the most global considerations of the target architecture.

AAAI Conference 1986 Conference Paper

A Mobile Robot with Onboard Parallel Processor and Large Workspace Arm

• Rodney A. Brooks

The MIT AI Lab’s second mobile robot, MOBOT-2, has a number of unique design features. In this paper we describe two of them in detail. First, MOBOT-2 has an extremely cheap 32 processor distributed control system. The processor system, called BARNACLE, runs asynchronously with no central locus of control. Unlike almost all other parallel processors this one has no expensive communications routing network. The communication topology is determined by a distributed patch panel. All computing is done onboard the robot. Second, MOBOT-2 has an onboard arm. It is lightweight, but has an extremely large working volume. The arm is controlled by the parallel processor.

ICRA Conference 1985 Conference Paper

Natural decomposition of free space for path planning

• Darwin T. Kuan
• James C. Zamiska
• Rodney A. Brooks

This paper describes an algorithm that decomposes the free space into nonoverlapping geometric-shaped primitives suitable for path planning. Given a set of polygonal obstacles in space, the algorithm first decomposes concave obstacles into connecting convex obstacles in order to have a uniform obstacle representation, which facilitates later processing. The neighborhood relations among these Convex obstacles are identified and then used to locate critical "channels" and "passage regions" in the free space, and to localize the influence of obstacles on free space description. The free space is then decomposed into nonoverlapping geometric-shaped primitives where channels connect passage regions. The channels are similar to the generalized cones presented in Brooks [1]. The passage regions are represented as convex polygons. Based on this mixed representation of free space, the path planning algorithm can plan path trajectories inside the channels and passage regions. The perimeter of the channels and passage regions associated with the planned path provides the boundaries of the path that the mobile robot must stay within during path execution.

ICRA Conference 1985 Conference Paper

Visual map making for a mobile robot

• Rodney A. Brooks

Mobile robots sense their environment and receive error laden readings. They try to move a certain distance and direction, and do so only approximately. Rather than try to engineer these problems away it may be possible, and may be necessary, to develop map making and navigation algorithms which explicitly represent these uncertainties, but still provide robust performance. The key idea is to use a relational map, which is rubbery and stretchy, rather than try to place observations in a 2-d coordinate system.

IJCAI Conference 1983 Conference Paper

A Subdivision Algorithm Configuration Space for Findpath With Rotation

• Rodney A. Brooks
• Tomes Lozano-Perez

A recursive cellular representation for configuration space is presented, along with an algorithm for searching that space for collision free paths. The details of the algorithm are presented for polygonal obstacles and a moving object with two translational and one rotational degrees of freedom.

AAAI Conference 1983 Conference Paper

Find-Path for a PUMA-Class Robot

• Rodney A. Brooks

Collision free motions for a manipulator with revolute joints (e.g. a PUMA) are planned through an obstacle littered workspace by first describing free space in two ways: as freeways for the hand and payload ensemble and as freeways for the up-perarm. Freeways match volumes swept out by manipulator motions and can be "inverted" to find a class of topologically equivalent path segments. The two freeway spaces are searched concurrently under protection of constraints determined by motion of the forearm.

AAAI Conference 1982 Conference Paper

Solving the Find-Path Problem by Good Representation of Free Space

• Rodney A. Brooks

Free space is represented as a union of (possibly overlapping) generalized cones. An algorithm is presented which efficiently finds good collision free paths for convex polygonal bodies through space Iittered with obstacle polygons. The paths are good in the sense that the distance of closest approach to an obstacle over the path is usually far from minimal over the class of topologically equivalent collision free paths. The algorithm is based on characterizing the volume swept by a body as it is translated and rotated as a generalized cone and determining under what conditions one generalized cone is a subset of another.

AIJ Journal 1981 Journal Article

Symbolic reasoning among 3-D models and 2-D images

• Rodney A. Brooks

We describe model-based vision systems in terms of four components: models, prediction of image features, description of image features, and interpretation which relates image features to models. We describe details of modelling, prediction and interpretation in an implemented model-based vision system. Both generic object classes and specific objects are represented by volume models which are independent of viewpoint. We model complex real world object classes. Variations of size, structure and spatial relations within object classes can be modelled. New spatial reasoning techniques are described which are useful both for prediction within a vision system, and for planning within a manipulation system. We introduce new approaches to prediction and interpretation based on the propagation of symbolic constraints. Predictions are two pronged. First, prediction graphs provide a coarse filter for hypothesizing matches of objects to image feature. Second, they contain instructions on how to use measurements of image features to deduce three dimensional information about tentative object interpretations. Interpretation proceeds by merging local hypothesized matches, subject to consistent derived implications about the size, structure and spatial configuration of the hypothesized objects. Prediction, description and interpretation proceed concurrently from coarse object subpart and class interpretations of images, to fine distinctions among object subclasses and more precise three dimensional quantification of objects. We distinguish our implementations from the fundamental geometric operations required by our general image understanding scheme. We suggest directions for future research for improved algorithms and representations.

AAAI Conference 1980 Conference Paper

Interpretive Vision and Restriction Graphs

• Rodney A. Brooks