By Daniel de Wolff

In 1988 Pattie Maes departed Brussels, Belgium to do postdoctoral research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). Here, she worked side-by-side with luminaries in the field like Marvin Minsky, and was particularly drawn to the work of Rodney Brooks.

The consummate contrarian, Brooks eschewed traditional thinking on AI and robotics, which presupposed that a machine must first be fed and then comprehend a complete picture of the environment in which it would be deployed. Brooks rethought the paradigm, introducing a bottom-up, behavior-based approach. Rather than trying to teach robots everything about the world before they entered it, he built robots that could perform basic tasks and learn from their environments using rudimentary vision systems and very little computation.

Asked to explain her affinity for Brooks’ line of research, Maes says, “I admired that Brooks was disrupting robotics research by pursuing a radically different, very simple approach that was motivated by how animals demonstrate seemingly intelligent behavior while just following innate reflexive behaviors.”