Rodney Brooks - Roboticist

Interesting Stuff for Download

Historical Documents

• John von Neumann's, "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC", June 1945. The linked version is a searchable version of how it appeared in a 1993 publication. And here is a scanned version of the 1945 report as it was produced.
• W. Grey Walter's first tortoise paper, "An Imitation of Life", Scientific American, 182(5), May 1950, 42--45.
• W. Grey Walter's second tortoise paper, "A Machine That Learns", Scientific American, 185(2), August 1951, 60--63.
• Marvin Minsky's Ph.D. thesis, "THEORY OF NEURAL-ANALOG REINFORCEMENT SYSTEMS AND ITS APPLICATION TO THE BRAIN-MODEL PROBLEM", Princeton University, 1954.
• Dartmouth 1956 Summer AI Project, Funding Proposal, 1955, possibly the first use of "artifcial intelligence".
• The Summer Vision Project, MIT AI Memo 100, 1966.
• Arthur Samuel's paper on playing checkers, 1959, where he introduced the term "Machine Learning".
• Donald Michie's second paper on playing tic-tac-toe, 1963, where he introduced the term "Reinforcement Learning".
• Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American ruminating on Michie's matchbox computer, 1963, March.
• Alan Turing's introduction of the Turing Machine "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", November 1936.
• Original version of Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", 1950.
• Complete version of Alan Turing's "Intelligent Machinery", 1948, not published until 1970 in Machine Intelligence 5.
• Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert Simon "Report on a General Problem-Solving Program", February 1959.
• Marvin Minsky's "Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence", 1961.
• Alonzo Church's "An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory", 1936.
• Alonzo Church's "A Note on the Entscheidungsproblem", 1936.
• Ada Lovelace's Translation of "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.", by L. F. Menabrea of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers" in Scientific Memoirs, Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies, and from Foreign Journals, edited by Richard Taylor, Vol III, London, 1843, pp 666-731. The file is the complete Volume of Scientific Memoirs. The Lovelace pages are pp 697-764 of the pdf. She signs her substantial Notes A through G, as "A.L.L." for Augusta Leigh Lovelace. The foldout with the annotated code (the world's first computer program!) for computing Bernoulli numbers is mangled in the ped at pages 762 and 763, where it should be located between the numbered pages 730 and 731. Here is a good scan of the fold out. In column 3 of line 4 the arguments to divide are incorrectly reversed. This is the world's first software bug!!!
• Randal Smith and Peter Cheeseman "On the Representation and Estimation of Spatial Uncertainty", International Journal of Robotics Research 5(4), 1986, pp 56--67.
• Heinrich Ernst "MH-1, A Computer-Operated Mechanical Hand", MIT PhD dissertation, 1961, first robot arm under computer control; advisor's Claude Shannon and Marvin Minsky.
• Kunihiko Fukushima introducing convolutional networks on page 291 of Volume 1 of the Proceedings of the Internationala Joint Conference (IJCAI) 1979 in Tokyo, a year before the common citation of the work. Here also is Volume 2 of the same proceedings.

Historical Movies

• Russell Andersson's ping pong playing industrial robot, 1987 (large: 5.5GB), thirty years ahead of media hype about doing this. This was his PhD thesis project at U Penn--I was his external committee member.
• Steven Jobs introducing the Macintosh, 1984.
• W. Grey Walter with his robot toroises, early 1950's.
• Douglas Engelbart's mother of all demos, introducing the mouse, cut and paste editing, text and graphics on a single screen, videoconferencing, etc., etc., December 9, 1968.
• Cynthia Breazeal's robot Kismet responding to prosody, 2000 (from her PhD defense as my student).
• Cynthia Breazeal's robot Kismet interacting with an experimental subject, 2000 (from her PhD defense as my student).
• Lionel Penrose (work with son Roger) self-reproducing wooden machines, part 1, 1957?
• Lionel Penrose (work with son Roger) self-reproducing wooden machines, part 2, 1961.
• Heinrich Ernst's MH-1 mechanical hand controlled by TX-0 computer, 1961.

Not Historical Perhaps, but important to me

• iRobot Grendel Lunar Rover prototype soft landing on a BMDO Brilliant Pebble, Oct 3, 1993, at Edwards Air Force Base.
• Rethink Robotics Intera 5 Software Platform, 2018.
• AI Hype Manufacturing Engineering back page, 1988.

Final Report from my 1999-2004 humanoid DARPA MARS program

The research program was about how to instruct robots to do novel tasks, through imitation (one shot) and social interaction. Much of the work was done with upper torso humanoid robots as the research platforms.

The research areas were as follows.

1. Knowing what aspects of behavior to imitate.
2. Mapping from one body to another.
3. Implementing corrective actions and recognizing success.
4. Chaining pieces of action together into larger tasks.
5. Generalizing imitated actions to different and more complex tasks.
6. Making the interactions intuitive for the human.

• The final report.
• 73 research papers describing the work, the filenames correspond to the reference numbers in the final report.