Shakey the Robot

Shakey was a wheeled research robot developed at SRI (then Stanford Research Institute) in California between roughly 1966 and 1972. It was called Shakey because it wobbled as it moved.

Why it was special

Shakey was among the first robots that could reason about its own actions. You could give it a goal such as "push the box to the other room," and it would work out a plan: find the door, push the box through, and so on. It used a camera, a range finder and bump sensors.

Famous outcomes

Work on Shakey produced ideas that robots still use:

• A* search, a method to find the shortest path through a map. It is used in games, maps and path planning.
• STRIPS, an early way to describe actions and goals so that a computer can plan.

What it could not do

Shakey was very slow. Its computer was in another room and took long to think, so a single move could take minutes. It worked only in simple rooms with plain objects.

Lesson

Modern robots are faster because of better computers and sensors, but they still follow the same loop Shakey used: sense, plan, act.