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86 Modern Robotics

Brooks also came across a book
by Grey Walter, inventor of the
“cybernetic tortoise” in the late
1940s. He tried to build his own
and came up with “Norman,”
a robot that could track light
sources while avoiding obstacles.
In 1968, when young Brooks
saw the movie 2001: A Space
Odyssey he was fascinated by the
artificial intelligence of its most
tragic character, the computer
HAL 9000.
Since Australian colleges had
Rodney Brooks of MIT has not yet established a computer sci-
pioneered a new architecture ence curriculum, Brooks majored
for robots, building in layers of in mathematics at Flinders
behavior and enabling machines University in South Australia. He
to learn through interaction with
humans. (Photo courtesy of Rodney did have access to the universi-
Brooks) ty’s computer, so he designed a
computer language and develop-
ment system for artificial intel-
ligence (AI) projects. Brooks also
explored various AI applications such as theorem-solving, lan-
guage processing, and games.

Studying Artificial Intelligence

Brooks was frustrated because there was no formal computer science
curriculum in Australia. He then discovered that certain American
universities were willing to provide research assistantships—
and so he enrolled at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California,
in 1977.
Brooks’s choice was fortunate because by the 1970s Stanford was
becoming one of the world’s foremost centers of artificial intelligence
research. While working for his Ph.D. in computer science, awarded
in 1981, Brooks met John McCarthy, one of the “elder statesmen”