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Richard Goodwin is a pioneering researcher in autonomous mobile robotics, best known for his groundbreaking work on web-based robot control and multi-goal reasoning. His key research areas include robot navigation, human-robot interaction, and formal methods for autonomous agents. Goodwin's most significant contribution is the development of Xavier, an autonomous indoor mobile robot that could accept commands via the web to travel to different offices while broadcasting camera images—a landmark experiment in remote robot operation. His foundational paper "A layered architecture for office delivery robots" (196 citations) established key principles for reliable autonomous navigation, addressing path planning, obstacle avoidance, and task scheduling. Goodwin also made important theoretical contributions to agent formalization, bridging the gap between formal logic and practical robotics in his work "Formalizing Properties of Agents" (79 citations). His research on when resource-bounded agents should begin acting versus planning ("Reasoning about when to start Acting") remains influential. With cumulative citations exceeding 600, Goodwin's work on Xavier demonstrated the viability of web-based robot interaction years before cloud robotics became mainstream, and his layered architecture approach continues to inform modern autonomous system design.