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AI-style robotics, on a robot which moved so slowly (due to the time taken
for computation) that, outdoors, the movement of sun and shadows would
confuse its internal repesentations (Brooks 2002, 30):
Despite the serious intent of the project, I could not but help feeling disap-
pointed. Grey Walter had been able to get his tortoises to operate autonomously
for hours on end, moving about and interacting with a dynamically changing
world and with each other. His robots were constructed from parts costing a
few tens of dollars. Here at the center of high technology, a robot relying on
millions of dollars of equipment did not appear to operate nearly as well. Inter-
nally it was doing much more than Grey Walter's tortoises had ever done—it
was building accurate three-dimensional models of the world and formulating
detailed plans within those models. But to an external observer all that internal
cogitation was hardly worth it.
It was against this background that Brooks's 1985 robot, Allen, stood out as a
revolutionary alternative. Allen dispensed with the “cognitive box” (Brooks
2002, 36) that was the hallmark and center of attention in contemporary
robotics in favor of the performative and adaptive engagement with the envi-
ronment that was the hallmark of the tortoises.
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This, of course, put him on
the wrong side of the law as far as the academic establishment was concerned,
and he has repeatedly told the story of how, during his first scholarly presenta-
tion of his new approach, one senior computer scientist whispered to another,
“Why is this young man throwing away his career?” Three referees unani-
mously recommended rejection of his first paper on this approach—though
it was published anyway (Brooks 1999 [1986]) and went on to become “one of
the most highly cited papers in all of robotics and computer science” (Brooks
2002, 43). In the event, though the “arguments . . . continue to today” (Brooks
2002, 43), Brooks's approach did succeed in redirecting the work of a sub-
stantial fraction of the robotic community back into Walterian, cybernetic
channels. One token of this success came in 2002, with the organization of a
major international conference, “Biologically-Inspired Robotics,” held at the
Hewlett-Packard Laboratory near Bristol and close to the Burden Institute.
Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Walter's death, the subtitle of the
conference was simply “The Legacy of W. Grey Walter.” Many of the principals
of this “new” field” gave invited addresses, and graduate students presented
an impressive array of talks.
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After a decades-long hiatus, then, at Brooks's lab at MIT, and many other
academic centers, too, the robotic wing of cybernetics finally gained what
