Shakey the Robot
The first robot that could "think".
Explore this event on the interactive timeline →Developed at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Shakey was the first mobile robot capable of reasoning about its own actions. Unlike industrial arms that blindly followed scripts, Shakey could perceive its environment and make plans.
Verified Facts
- If given a high-level command like "push the block off the platform," Shakey would look around with its camera, figure out it needed a ramp, find a ramp, push it to the platform, and then roll up to complete the task.
- To accomplish this, SRI engineers had to invent entirely new fields of computer science, including the A* pathfinding algorithm (which is still used in almost every video game today).
- It was notoriously slow; it would move slightly, stop, process data for several minutes in a massive off-board computer, and then jerkily move again (hence the name "Shakey").