In 1986, Rodney Brooks introduced the idea of the Subsumption Architecture into the world of robotics changing its landscape forever since. His view on artificial intelligence went against the trend of the time, of centralizing symbolic processing, which was not delivering the kind of intelligent behavior that would be equivalent to even the simplest of living organisms.

The idea behind the Subsumption Architecture was to decentralize intelligence in a way that is very similar to what we know to be true about the nervous system. It decomposes the intelligence of the system into many simpler modules organized in layers. The lower layers take care of basic tasks like obstacle avoidance and the higher ones take care of more complex tasks like environment exploration. Lower layer modules work quicker, like reflexes, but higher layers have the posibility of inhibiting the lower layers.

The result of this new philosophy was the emergence of a new generation of robots much simpler in design that were able to achieve much more interesting real environment behavior. The first one, Genghis, was built in the mid 80s at MIT by Rodney Brooks and looked like a large insect. It can be seen in the first images of the above youtube clip.

What Brooks did was to divide robotics between two basic paradigms: the  deliberative paradigm and the reactive paradigm. The deliberative paradigm represents the classical approach in which the robot senses the world, plans the next action and then acts. The subsumption architecture is representative for the second paradigm, also known as the sense/react paradigm. A third and more recent trend is to try to get the best out of the two philosophies, resulting into a hybrid paradigm.

In 2002, Rodney Brooks was present on BBC’s HARDtalk speaking about his views on the future of robotics. You can download the show here. One year later, he gave a very interesting talk at TED called How robots will invade our lives, which you can see here.