He was a Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

[8] Instead of computation as the ultimate conceptual metaphor that helped artificial intelligence become a separate discipline in the scientific community, he proposed that action or behavior is more appropriate to be used in robotics.

I think we are perhaps better off using Newtonian mechanics (with a little Einstein thrown in) to understand and predict the orbits of planets and others.

[9]In his 1990 paper, "Elephants Don't Play Chess",[10] Brooks argued that for robots to accomplish everyday tasks in an environment shared by humans, their higher cognitive abilities, including abstract thinking emulated by symbolic reasoning, need to be based on the primarily sensory-motor coupling (action) with the environment, complemented by the proprioceptive sense which is a critical component in hand–eye coordination, pointing out that: Over time there's been a realization that vision, sound-processing, and early language are maybe the keys to how our brain is organized.

[citation needed] Before Lucid closed, Brooks had founded iRobot with former students Colin Angle and Helen Greiner.