Polly (robot)

Polly was a robot created at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Ian Horswill for his PhD, which was published in 1993 as a technical report. It was the first mobile robot to move at animal-like speeds (1m per second) using computer vision for its navigation. It was an example of behavior based robotics. Horswill's PhD supervisors were Rodney Brooks and Lynn Andrea Stein. For a few years, Polly was able to give tours of the AI laboratory's seventh floor, using canned speech to point out landmarks such as Anita Flynn's office. 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.