In episode #101, Robots Podcast revisits the foundations of the field of robotics and peeks into the future with pioneers George Bekey and Rodney Brooks. Bekey, whose background was in engineering and computing, had his first brush with robotics in the 1960s. He returned to the field in the 80s and founded the Robotics Research Laboratory at the University of Southern California, now part of the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems. Brooks received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981 and then held research positions at Carnegie Mellon and MIT before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He became Director of the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), continuing in that post until 2007. He was also a cofounder of iRobot, and has since become the founder, chairman and CTO of Heartland Robotics.

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