Rodney Brooks is an Australian roboticist, author and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularising the actionist approach to robotics.
Instead of computation as the ultimate conceptual metaphor that helped artificial intelligence become a separate discipline in the scientific community, he proposed that action or behaviour are more appropriate to be used in robotics.
In the late 1980s, Brooks and his team introduced Allen, a robot using Subsumption Architecture, a term introduced by Brooks and his colleagues in 1986.
Among Brooks' many publications, his early papers describing what was at that time an entirely different approach to a robot operating system are very interesting.
See References page, Rodney Brooks' Publications page, or the References section on his Wikipedia page.