Rodney Brooks

At a time when billions are pouring into humanoid robotics and generative AI, Rodney Brooks has emerged as one of the field’s most credible counterweights to hype.

He has challenged the prevailing strategy in humanoid robotics that trains large AI models on videos of humans performing tasks in the hope that dexterity will simply emerge. Unlike vision and speech, which has benefited from decades of sensor development and large-scale data infrastructure, robotics lacks comparable tactile data. Without it, he calls the approach “pure fantasy.”

Brooks’ critique carries weight because he has built at scale. As co-founder of iRobot, he helped bring the Roomba into millions of homes, making it the most widely deployed consumer robot in history. He later founded Rethink Robotics, introducing collaborative robots such as Baxter and Sawyer to factory floors. Earlier, he led the AI Lab and CSAIL at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shaping a generation of robotics research.

Today, as co-founder and CTO of Robust.AI, Rodney Brooks is building cognitive platforms for warehouse and logistics robots designed to operate safely, predictably and at scale in real commercial environments.

What makes him particularly compelling on stage is his discipline around prediction. Since 2018, Brooks has publicly published and revisited his long-range forecasts on self-driving cars, humanoid robots, Mars colonisation and AI — often concluding that even he was too optimistic. His central message is consistent: early demos are easy; dependable deployment is hard. Brooks’ perspective is not anti-technology but grounded in engineering reality and the hard economics of deployment.

Rodney Brooks is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE and AAAI. He has received the IEEE Founders Medal and the Engelberger Robotics Award.