Roomba’s ancestors were probably Elmer and Elsie, a pair of cybernetic tortoises invented in the 1940s by neurophysiologist W. Grey Walter. The robots could “see” by means of a rotating photocell that steered them toward a light source. If the light was too bright, they would retreat and continue their exploration in a new direction…
In the late 1940s, Walter became involved in the emerging community of scientists who were interested in cybernetics. The field’s founder, Norbert Wiener, defined cybernetics as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” In the first wave of cybernetics, people were keen on building machines to model animal behavior. Claude Shannon played around with a robotic mouse named Theseus that could navigate mazes. W. Ross Ashby built the Homeostat, a machine that automatically adapted to inputs so as to remain in a stable state…
https://spectrum.ieee.org/meet-roombas-ancestor-cybernetic-tortoise