> Were they that desperate for funding that they had to come up with some AI stuff for an already solved problem?
Path finding is one of the classic AI research areas, back when it mostly meant making robots able to interact with their environment. Yes, it's an "already solved problem", in that we already have several good enough algorithms derived from all that AI research; but that doesn't change the fact that this is "AI stuff", and it doesn't prevent new AI approaches from being used (perhaps something based on neural networks as a path finding heuristic, since we have a lot of computing power to spare nowadays).
Path finding is one of the classic AI research areas, back when it mostly meant making robots able to interact with their environment. Yes, it's an "already solved problem", in that we already have several good enough algorithms derived from all that AI research; but that doesn't change the fact that this is "AI stuff", and it doesn't prevent new AI approaches from being used (perhaps something based on neural networks as a path finding heuristic, since we have a lot of computing power to spare nowadays).