Subsumption Architecture

A layered robot-control architecture wiring simple behaviors straight from sensing to action, where higher layers override lower ones.

Subsumption architecture was introduced by MIT's Rodney Brooks in his 1986 paper “A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot,” and it is the foundational work of behavior-based robotics. It rejects the traditional sense-plan-act pipeline, which first builds a complete world model, then plans, then executes. Instead, control is split into several parallel behavior layers, each wiring sensors directly to actuators through a simple finite state machine: lower layers handle obstacle avoidance, higher layers handle wandering and exploration, and a higher layer can inhibit or override a lower layer's inputs and outputs, “subsuming” its behavior. The approach is fast and robust, but struggles to support complex reasoning and language understanding, and is often seen as one of the roots of both embodied cognition and the behaviorist school of AI.

ExampleGenghis, a six-legged robot from Brooks's lab, walked using layered simple behaviors; another robot, Herbert, used the same approach to collect empty soda cans around an office.

Also called

Behavior-based Robotics

Related

Sense-Plan-Act · Three Schools of AI · Embodied Cognition · Finite State Machine · Moravec's Paradox · Behavior Tree

Sources

Subsumption architecture - Wikipedia