ABSTRACT: As the 21st century has dawned we have seen a dramatic uptake of robots for unstructured environments; already from zero to thousands of ground robots in the US military, and from zero to many millions of home cleaning robots world wide.  The technology of robots for unstructured environments is able to ride the coattails of many large scale deployments in other industries, from cell phones to safer automobiles.  At the same time the demand for more robotics is being driven by demographics and changing expectations of safe, healthy, and satisfying working conditions. By 2050 we can expect to see wide scale deployment of robots throughout all aspects of our homes, our service sector, and primary and secondary industries.  These robots will start as tele-oped or for simple applications, but will gradually become human assistants, and move towards more and more autonomous complex applications.

BIOGRAPHY: Rodney Brooks is Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT. He is also Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp. From 1997 - 2003 and from 2003 - 2007, respectively, he was Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. 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 papers and books in 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. Dr. Brooks is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts &Sciences (AAAS), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the other AAAS), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) and a Foreign Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE). He won the Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence). He was co-founding editor of the InternationalJournal of Computer Vision and is a member of the editorial boards of various journals.