Polly was a robot created at the

MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence La ...

Ian Horswill Ian or Iain is a name of Scottish Gaelic origin, derived from the Hebrew given name ( Yohanan, ') and corresponding to the English name John. The spelling Ian is an Anglicization of the Scottish Gaelic forename ''Iain''. It is a popular name i ...

for his PhD and published in 1993 as a

technical report A technical report (also scientific report) is a document that describes the process, progress, or results of technical or scientific research or the state of a technical or scientific research problem. It might also include recommendations and co ...

. Polly was the first mobile robot to move at animal-like speeds (1m per second) using

computer vision Computer vision is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate t ...

for its navigation. It was an example of

behavior-based robotics Behavior-based robotics (BBR) or behavioral robotics is an approach in robotics that focuses on robots that are able to exhibit complex-appearing behaviors despite little internal variable state to model its immediate environment, mostly gradually ...

. Horswill's PhD supervisors were

Rodney Brooks Rodney Allen Brooks (born 30 December 1954) is an Australian roboticist, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics. He was a Panasonic Profe ...

and

Lynn Andrea Stein Lynn may refer to: People and fictional characters * Lynn (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters * Lynn (surname) * The Lynns, a 1990s American country music duo consisting of twin sisters Peggy and Patsy Lynn * Lynn ( ...

. For a few years Polly gave tours of the AI laboratory's seventh floor, using canned speech to point out landmarks such as Anita Flynn's office. When someone approached Polly, it would introduce itself and offer a tour, asking them to answer by waving their foot.Horswill, Ian. "Polly: A vision-based artificial agent." ''Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence'' (AAAI). 1993. The "Polly algorithm" is a way to navigate in a cluttered space using very low resolution vision to find uncluttered areas to move forward into, assuming that the pixels at the bottom of the frame (the closest to the robot) show an example of an uncluttered area. Since this could be done 60 times a second, the algorithm only needed to discriminate three categories: telling the robot at each instant to go straight, towards the right or towards the left. Polly was built from minimalist machinery and runs on a hardware platform that could be duplicated for less than $10,000. The machine was intended to show that very simple visual machinery can be used to solve real tasks in unmodified environments.

References

Rolling robots Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1993 robots Robots of the United States {{robo-stub