Rodney Brooks’ Three Laws of Robotics

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2025-01-10 15:00:08

Here are some of the things I’ve learned about robotics after working in the field for almost five decades. In honor of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, my two boyhood go-to science fiction writers, I’m calling them my three laws of robotics.

Note that these laws are written from the point of view of making robots work in the real world, where people pay for them, and where people want return on their investment. This is very different from demonstrating robots or robot technologies in the laboratory.

In the lab there is phalanx of graduate students eager to demonstrate their latest idea, on which they have worked very hard, to show its plausibility. Their interest is in showing that a technique or technology that they have developed is plausible and promising. They will do everything in their power to nurse the robot through the demonstration to make that point, and they will eagerly explain everything about what they have developed and what could come next.

In the real world there is just the customer, or the employee or relative of the customer. The robot has to work with no external intervention from the people who designed and built it. It needs to be a good experience for the people around it or there will not be more sales to those, and perhaps other, customers.