Brooks first presented his 1986 layered-architecture work in France.

True if evidence shows that the first public presentation of Brooks's layered or subsumption architecture (around 1985–1986) took place in France, for example at a robotics symposium such as ISRR 1985 in Gouvieux, France. Mostly true if the first presentation was in France but the event or date is slightly misstated. Mostly false if the evidence shows an earlier presentation elsewhere, with a French presentation early but not first. False if it was not presented in France at all in that early period.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Peer Review Rodney Brooks (rodneybrooks.com) · 18 May 2020 Own record

   “A year later I was ready to talk about the what I was doing, and submitted a journal paper describing the technical idea and an initial implementation.”

2. E2 A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot MIT Open Scholarship / DSpace@MIT · 1 September 1985

   “meta-citation_publication_date: 1985-09-01”

3. E3 Subsumption architecture WikiDoc · 6 September 2012

   “Brooks, R. A., "A Robust Programming Scheme for a Mobile Robot", Proceedings of NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Languages for Sensor-Based Control in Robotics, Castelvecchio Pascoli, Italy, September 1986.”

4. E4 Subsumption architecture WikiDoc · 6 September 2012

   “Brooks, R. A., and J. Connell, "Asynchronous Distributed Control System for a Mobile Robot", Proceedings of SPIE's Cambridge Symposium on Optical and Optoelectronic Engineering, Cambridge, MA, October 1986, pp. 77–84.”

5. E5 Task Modeling for Planning an Autonomous Mobile Robot Springer (Robotic Systems, Tzafestas ed., Dordrecht) · 1992

   “R. A. Brooks, “A Layered Intelligent Control System for a Mobile Robot”, Proc. of the 3rd International Symposium of Robotic Research, Gouvieux, France, October 1985.”

6. E6 Robot Mind or Robot Body: Whatever happened to the Subsumption Architecture? - Artificial Human Companions Artificial Human Companions · 7 June 2016

   “In 1985, a rebellious young researcher named Rodney Brooks published the innocently titled paper, “A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot”, basically implying that the history of Artificial Intelligence research up to that point was bunk.”

E5, an independent reference list, cites Brooks's "A Layered Intelligent Control System for a Mobile Robot" in the proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium of Robotics Research in Gouvieux, France, in October 1985. The September 1985 MIT AI Memo (E2) is a written report, not a presentation. The other listed presentations, in Italy and in Cambridge, MA (E3, E4), took place in 1986, after Gouvieux. None of the evidence shows an earlier presentation outside France, so the first known presentation was in France. The evidence places the presentation in October 1985 [E5], but does not directly confirm that it was the very first.