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19 Subsumption architecture, Frost explains, is an approach to layering different levels of autonomous behaviours into very simple robots. The specific layering sequence of simple behaviours such as returning to the charger when the battery is low causes more complex behaviours to emerge in the robots through the interaction of the simpler ones in response to the priority rules the programmer gives them in different circumstances. Having earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer engineering, with a focus on robotics, Frost joined iRobot in 1998. (In 2016, iRobot separated its civil and military businesses, the latter becoming Endeavour Robotics, which FLIR Systems bought in February 2019.) He was attracted by the idea of learning from Rod Brooks and getting to grips with developing robots for real-world applications. He regards Brooks, along with his fellow iRobot founders Helen Grainer and Colin Angle, as mentors from whom he learned a lot about how to create successful products during the process that led to the military PackBot and the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. “Early on, we were trying to come up with product concepts that would make iRobot successful,” he says. “We had multiple failures and concepts that were just not going to make any sense sales- wise before we found success with the PackBot and the Roomba. What I came away with is that you need to design a solution that matches the price point of the customer.” It was with the PackBot, however, that he had what turned out to be an even more profound formative experience. The company was in the late stages of developing the PackBot, under a programme known as Tactical Mobile Robotics sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA), when 9/11 happened. Lessons from Afghanistan Frost was the PackBot’s programme manager at the time, and led a team to carry out search and rescue duties in New York. “It was the first time we used the DARPA prototypes, which hadn’t been tested thoroughly in the real world, and applied them to a real operation.” He had only just returned to iRobot’s Burlington, Massachusetts, facility from the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York when the US military’s Rapid Equipping Force asked iRobot to send a team to support the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the mountains and caves of Afghanistan. As a civilian engineer, he flew to Bagram Air Base with the US Army and spent the summer of 2002 deploying the robots with various forces, using them to search caves, bunkers and compounds, so that the soldiers didn’t have to go in first, he says. He learned a lot from what he calls walking in the boots of his customer. As the PackBot was designed to be carried by a soldier, Frost made a point of marching around the air base with the soldiers in 112 F heat with the robot in his backpack. He also learned about how tough the robots themselves had to be to keep working through rough handling, a lesson subsequently applied to the 5 lb FirstLook throwable reconnaissance UGV. There were also engineering Tom Frost | In conversation I didn’t like my creations being captive in the computer. To me, robotics was a way to make the code live in the real world Unmanned Systems Technology | June/July 2019 Smaller and lighter than the PackBot, FirstLook is designed to go into dangerous places so that soldiers don’t have to, and is built to survive being thrown into a room