Robin John Popplestone (9 December 1938 in Bristol – 14 April 2004 in Glasgow)[1] was a pioneer in the fields of machine intelligence and robotics.

He is known for developing the POP programming languages COWSEL (renamed POP-1), POP-2, POP-11, the related multi-language integrated development environment Poplog, and for his work on the Freddy II robot with Pat Ambler at the University of Edinburgh Artificial Intelligence laboratory.

His project was to develop a program for automated theorem proving, but he got caught up in using the university computer to design a boat.

[1] He built the boat and set sail for the University of Edinburgh, where he had been offered a research position.

In 1990, he was elected a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.