Shakey the Robot in its display case at the Computer History Museum.
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Manufacturer | SRI International |
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Year of creation | 1966 - 1972 |
Replaced by | Flakey the robot |
Shakey the robot was the first general-purpose mobile robot to be able to reason about its own actions. While other robots would have to be instructed on each individual step of completing a larger task, Shakey could analyze commands and break them down into basic chunks by itself.
Due to its nature, the project combined research in robotics, computer vision, and natural language processing. Because of this, it was the first project that melded logical reasoning and physical action. Shakey was developed at the Artificial Intelligence Center of Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International).
Some of the most notable results of the project include the A* search algorithm, the Hough transform, and the visibility graph method.
Shakey was developed from approximately 1966 through 1972 with Charles Rosen as project manager. Other major contributors included Nils Nilsson, Alfred Brain, Sven Wahlstrom, Bertram Raphael,Richard Duda, Peter Hart, Richard Fikes, Richard Waldinger, Thomas Garvey, Jay Tenenbaum, and Michael Wilber. The project was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Now retired from active duty, Shakey is currently on view in a glass display case at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The project inspired numerous other robotics projects, most notably the Centibots.