Embley: The Robot that Loves People (2003)

Experiment in robotics, ambient and affective computing. Embley was programmed to try to identify when it has encountered a human, and when it has, to send a signal back to a main computer. This iteration was set up to identify ground obstacles, and then to check for object movement at a greater height. This was surprisingly successful, possibly because the quirky robot design charmed encountered humans into movement.

Embley was programmed using a subsumption architecture, and could potentially offload higher level functions onto an ambient computing space (for example, a 'smart room').

See original documentation here.