Brooks’ “subsumption architecture”
[This] alternative decomposition makes no distinction between peripheral systems, such as vision, and central systems. Rather the fundamental slicing up of an intelligent system is in the orthogonal direction dividing it into activity producing subsystems. Each activity or behavior producing system individually connects sensing to action. We refer to an activity producing system as a layer. An activity is a pattern of interactions with the world. Another name for our activities might well be skill … (Brooks 1991, 146)
Thus, Herbert [the robot] has one subsystem for detecting and avoiding obstacles in its path, another for wandering around, a third for finding distant soda cans and homing in on them, a fourth for noticing nearby soda cans and putting its hand around them, a fifth for detecting something between its fingers and closing them, and so on … fourteen in all. What’s striking is that these are all complete input/output systems, more or less independent of each other. They can’t be entirely independent, of course, because, for instance, Herbert has only one set of wheels; so if two different subsystems undertake to move the robot at the same moment, one must dominate—through some interface. But the bulk of the interactions, the tightest couplings, are within the respective activity layers—including, as Brooks explicitly points out, interactions with the world.
…each of Herbert’s highest-level subsystems is somewhat mental, somewhat bodily, and somewhat worldly. That is, according to Simon’s principles of intensity of interaction, the primary division is not into mind, body, and world, but rather into “layers” that cut across these in various ways. And, in particular, the outer surface of the robot is not a primary interface.
—Haugeland, J., 2000: Mind Embodied and Embedded, pp. 11-12. Chapter 9 in Haugeland, J., 2000: Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Harvard University Press. (Citing Brooks, R., 1991: Intelligence Without Representation.)
author:brooks-rodney paper:brooks-intelligence-without-representation author:haugeland-john book:haugeland-having-thought paper:haugeland-mind-embodied-and-embedded snip:brooks-subsumption-architecture perception independence concurrence design robotics subsumption-architecture list:mind-body-world
