
Rodney Brooks - prostoalex
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614124/rodney-brooks/
======
lisper
Rod Brooks was on my thesis committee. His work was inspirational, but the
subsumption architecture was badly flawed and ultimately proved to be a dead
end. It's simply not true that "the world is its own best model" because
wherever you are you can only see a small part of the world. It works great if
all you want to do is avoid obstacles, but if you want to do anything complex
and goal-directed, a robot really does have to be able to remember things. The
reason he was so influential is because the dominant paradigm at the time, the
so-called sense-plan-act model, was just as much of a dead end, and on top of
that, produced really boring demos so it was doubly doomed. The right answer
is to combine the two approaches with a layer of "glue" that connects them
together in a so-called "three-layer" architecture [1]. That's actually the
way that autonomous robots work today (AFAIK -- I've been out of the business
for a very long time now).

[1]
[http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/tla.pdf](http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/tla.pdf)

~~~
derefr
I wonder under which paradigm the modern robots of iRobot (the Roomba company,
where Brooks works today) are developed. Them being three-layer would be a
pretty good indictment of pure-subsumption as an architecture.

~~~
dbcurtis
> iRobot (the Roomba company, where Brooks works today)

That was two companies ago, AFAIK

Edit: And, indeed, TFA says as much.

~~~
lisper
TFA?

~~~
dbcurtis
The Fine Article

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msadowski
I quite appreciated Rodney's paper from 1985 titled "A Robust Layered Control
System for a Mobile Robot" [1]. I'm sometimes wondering if mobile robotics
would look much different without this paper or if we would arrive to
something similar anyway.

I even asked Rodney Brooks whether the results of this paper were applied on
some robot platform as a follow up research and received a very interesting
reply [2]. I agree that I might have worded it poorly but it's still one of my
favourite tweets.

[1]
[https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a160833.pdf](https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a160833.pdf)
[2]
[https://twitter.com/WeeklyRobotics/status/105775034299205222...](https://twitter.com/WeeklyRobotics/status/1057750342992052224)

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PeterStuer
Great guy. Here's an anecdote from that time. He spent a few months on
sabbatical at our lab ( [https://ai.vub.ac.be/](https://ai.vub.ac.be/) ) in
those days. We were preparing robots for a NATO Advanced Study Institute (
[https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642796319](https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642796319)
), and I was struggling writing the serial driver for a custom embedded
computer for this as the system kept crashing (due to a bug in the dram
controller). Anyways, Rod Brooks, offered to help me with the coding. It
wasn't needed as the code was not the problem, but I don't know many
professors that could and would be prepared to dive in that deep.

P.S. I posted this comment in reply to a Brooks reference a few days back, but
might be more on topic here.

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neilv
A useful search term the article didn't mention:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture)

Before you get into that, it's delightful to start with the Braitenberg
"Vehicles" book:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle)

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jefft255
I love how he's constantly dubious about autonomous robots news on twitter.
Yesterday he criticized the Berkeley delivery
[https://twitter.com/rodneyabrooks/status/1165736688141787136...](https://twitter.com/rodneyabrooks/status/1165736688141787136?s=20)
for not being autonomous and their short distances. He's also very skeptical
about self-driving cars in general.

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kwhitefoot
Allen sounds remarkably like a new version of Grey Walter's Machina
speculatrix:
[https://sites.google.com/view/machinaspeculatrix/home](https://sites.google.com/view/machinaspeculatrix/home)

