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About

Jonathan Simpson is a researcher whose work sits at the intersection of robotics, concurrent programming, and software architecture. His primary contributions focus on applying process-oriented programming paradigms — particularly the occam-pi language — to mobile robot control, establishing a distinctive approach to building reliable, concurrent robotic systems. Simpson's most influential work (21 citations) demonstrated how Brooks' subsumption architecture could be effectively implemented using occam-pi, bringing principled concurrency to general-purpose robotics hardware. He extended this foundation to educational contexts, exploring visual process-oriented programming as a tool for teaching concurrency concepts and deploying concurrent environments on accessible platforms like the LEGO Mindstorms RCX. His collaborative work at Olin College introduced undergraduate students to parallel programming through hands-on robotics, demonstrating the pedagogical value of safe parallelism in behavioral control. Later research scaled these ideas toward swarm robotics, investigating whether process-based subsumption architectures could handle more complex, multi-robot scenarios. Collectively, Simpson's contributions helped bridge formal concurrency theory and practical robotics engineering, offering both researchers and educators structured, communicating-process approaches to designing robust autonomous systems.