https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Brooks
He and his colleagues invented "Subsumption Architecture" in 1986, which he later applied to the Roomba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture
>Subsumption architecture is a reactive robotic architecture heavily associated with behavior-based robotics which was very popular in the 1980s and 90s. The term was introduced by Rodney Brooks and colleagues in 1986. Subsumption has been widely influential in autonomous robotics and elsewhere in real-time AI.
>Overview: Subsumption architecture is a control architecture that was proposed in opposition to traditional AI, or GOFAI. Instead of guiding behavior by symbolic mental representations of the world, subsumption architecture couples sensory information to action selection in an intimate and bottom-up fashion.
>It does this by decomposing the complete behavior into sub-behaviors. These sub-behaviors are organized into a hierarchy of layers. Each layer implements a particular level of behavioral competence, and higher levels are able to subsume lower levels (= integrate/combine lower levels to a more comprehensive whole) in order to create viable behavior. For example, a robot's lowest layer could be "avoid an object". The second layer would be "wander around", which runs beneath the third layer "explore the world". Because a robot must have the ability to "avoid objects" in order to "wander around" effectively, the subsumption architecture creates a system in which the higher layers utilize the lower-level competencies. The layers, which all receive sensor-information, work in parallel and generate outputs. These outputs can be commands to actuators, or signals that suppress or inhibit other layers.: 8–12, 15–16
R. A. Brooks (1986), "A Robust Layer Control System for a Mobile Robot", IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation RA-2, 14-23.:
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a160833.pdf
R. Brooks and A. Flynn (Anita M. Flynn) (1989), "Fast, cheap, and out of control: A robot invasion of the solar system," J. Brit. Interplanetary Soc., vol. 42, no. 10, pp. 478–485, 1989. (The paper later gave rise to the title of the film Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and the paper's concepts arguably have been seen in practice in the 1997 Mars Pathfinder and then 2004 Mars Exploration Rover Mission.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast,_Cheap_%26_Out_of_Control
https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/1997-11-14/518907/
>Fast, Cheap & Out of Control: Interview With Filmmaker Errol Morris
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/21/133411/rodney-br...
>Rodney Brooks: The professor who got robots zipping through the world—and cleaning house—by challenging conventional wisdom in AI.
>Rodney Brooks was hot, bored, and isolated at his in-laws’ home in Thailand when he had an inspiration that would redirect the field of robotics and lead to Roomba vacuums in millions of homes.
>It was December 1984. Brooks was turning 30, and as a new member of the MIT faculty, he was trying to get robots to move about in the world. If they could, they might grant wishes from science fiction: venture into dangerous places, explore space, clean our houses.
https://www.wired.com/story/roomba-robot-consciousness-enlig...
>My Roomba Has Achieved Enlightenment: To my robovac, hitting a doorjamb and cleaning with dispatch are one and the same. There is no success or failure—these concepts have merged.
>ALL THROUGH THE fall my head was spinning, and I steered into the spin by watching Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.
>Errol Morris' rhapsodic 1997 documentary about a bunch of monomaniacs features a xylophone-heavy score and the roboticist Rodney Brooks. I wanted to hear Brooks dilate on robots in his cosmic way again.