Rodney Brooks is Panasonic Professor of Robotics, emeritus at MIT.  He was an undergraduate in pure mathematics in his native Australia, and received a Ph.D. from Stanford in Computer Science in 1981, and went on to post-docs at CMU and MIT, and a faculty member at Stanford, before joining the MIT faculty from 1984 to 2010, and was director of MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). He was cofounder and CTO of iRobot, from 1990 to 2008, and then founded Rethink Robotics. Sawyer is the latest collaborative robot from Rethink Robotics and is working in factories around the world, in close proximity to people, with a modern user interface that teaches people how to use it as they get it to do new tasks. Brooks is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and has been a researcher in computer vision, artificial life, and robotic