Buildings, in a way, are the most complex “robots” we inteact with. A typical commercial building contains thousands of sensing and actuation points. The control of these building systems (HVAC, lighting, etc.) is often manually programmed by engineers using heuristics.
Did you ever think your room was the coldest in the house and wonder why the thermostat wasn’t maintaining the temperature you set? This often happens because most thermostats are “blind” against the temperatures of other rooms; they regulate the entire house based on the temperature detected by the sensor in the thermostat itself. This approach has been accepted based on the assumption that there isn’t much temperature discrepancy between rooms in a house. While this assumption might hold for a one-bedroom home, I have significant doubts about its validity in houses with multiple rooms, like townhouses in the US.