Introducing subsumption architecture
At this point, I want to spend a bit of time on the idea behind the subsumption architecture, and point out some specifics of how we will be using this concept in the design of our robot project. Many of you will be familiar with the concept from school or from study, so you can look at my diagram and then move on. For the rest of us, let’s talk a bit about this biologically inspired robot concept.
Subsumption architecture was originally described by Dr. Rodney Brooks, a professor at MIT, who would later help found iRobot Corporation and invent the Baxter robot. Rodney was trying to develop analogs of insect brains in order to understand how to program intelligent robots. Robots before this time (1986) were very much single-threaded machines that pretty much only did one thing at a time. They read sensors, made decisions, and then acted – and only had one goal at any one time. Creatures such as flies or ants have very simple brains...
