Funny thing: I was a peon in Rod Brooks' group right at this transition. The robot I worked on was a small monster, which would beam data offboard to a lisp-machine for analysis (machine-vision problems, etc). Just after I left, Rod decided to go down the path of having small simple FSMs connected together, which it turns out displayed some pretty complex behavior. Then Colin Angle showed up.

Boy did I leave at the wrong time. :)