makerfaire.com:

Maker Faire Bay Area 2009
Remaking American Manufacturing with Robotics

Stage A , Saturday 3:00 PM - 3:30 PM

American Manufacturing remains a strong segment of the American economy and is more adaptable and flexible than ever before. At Heartland Robotics we've visited many factories around the country over the last six months and have learned how that flexibility is achieved: through a combination of large numbers of production workers and a lot of ingenious custom engineering. Every facility we've visited has onsite engineers who design and build specialized tools, jigs, and automatic machines for their own unique facility. These engineers work constantly with production workers to modify lines and machines for improvements in productivity and quality. But American industry will face challenges from changing demographics, as the availability of production workers declines. Workers can use robots to fill the gap, but general purpose industrial robots remain relatively rare in American factories. What will it take for robots to be added to the toolchest of the makers of American manufacturing, so that they can increase productivity, provide better jobs for American workers, and compete even more strongly in our globalized world?

Web site: http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks

About the Maker(s)

Rodney Brooks
Dr. Rodney Brooks is a robotics entrepreneur and Founder, Chairman and CTO of Heartland Robotics, Inc. He is also a Founder, Board Member and former CTO (1991 - 2008) of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT) and the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (on leave) at MIT. Dr. Brooks is the former Director (1997 - 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelliigence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He has pubished many papers and books in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life.