subsumption architecture

A robot control architecture built from stacked layers of simple behaviors that run concurrently, each wiring sensing straight to action; a higher layer, such as one that explores, can take over from those beneath it, such as obstacle avoidance and aimless wandering, by suppressing their inputs or inhibiting their outputs. Layers are built and debugged bottom-up, so the robot stays useful if higher layers fail. The architecture deliberately avoids a central world model, symbolic representation and planner; Rodney Brooks summed up the stance as 'the world is its own best model'. It was a reaction against the sense–model–plan–act pipeline of classical AI robots such as ShakeyShakey the robot, prop. n.: A wheeled robot built at a California research institute between 1966 and 1972 that could look around, make a plan and carry it out: the first mobile robot to work out its own steps toward a goal., which were slow and brittle in real environments, and it founded behavior-based robotics, which produced fast, robust insect-like robots in the late 1980s and 1990s. Its limits on tasks needing memory, planning or abstraction led to hybrid architectures that place deliberative planning over reactive control, an arrangement echoed in robots that pair language-model planners with fast learned controllers.

The cleaning robot's bump-and-turn behavior is subsumption in miniature.