Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System

Brooks, Flynn

robotics architecture situated subsumption intelligence ai swarms emergent behavior

@article{brooks:bis-1989,
  title={Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System},
  author={Brooks, R. A. and Flynn, A. M.},
  booktitle={Journal of the {British} Interplanetary Society},
  year={1989},
  volume={42}

Swarms of smaller, simpler robots should be used for interplanetary exploration

• Reduce launch mass
• Reduce development cost, complexity
• Increase robustness
• Produce faster, via mass production of standard components
  • Rather than current hand-built spacecraft
• Total autonomy reduces mission and systems costs, complexity, improve survivability via tight local reaction

Much simpler approach that traditional AI

• No planning
• No central representation
• No world modeling

Two standard development principles

• Emulate biology and evolution
• Test against the real world

Layer simple behaviors into more complex systems

• Subsumption architecture
  • Augmented finite state machines (timers can trigger state shifts after some time has elapsed with no events)
• Don't share models or what was supposed to happen between components---continually sense the world

Change notions of locomotion

• Tiny robot may not climb over large rocks; but it could be wind-borne over the rocks...

Most robots are just not smart enough for the cost involved

• Could focus on making larger robots smarter
• Or make as-smart robots smaller...

Chip-based robots

Massive parallelism

Communication is a problem on such small platforms