From 1966 to 1972, researchers at SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center built Shakey, which SRI describes as “the first mobile robot with the ability to perceive and reason about its surroundings.” Earlier robots either stayed bolted to a factory floor or were driven directly by a human. Shakey was different: given a goal, it could plan a sequence of actions, navigate a set of rooms, and push objects around to accomplish the task.
Shakey was a research platform for the hard problem of connecting sensing, reasoning, and acting in a single system. The robot used a camera and bump sensors to build a model of its world, a planner to decide what to do, and a wheeled base to carry it out. The name came from how unsteadily it moved.
The project’s lasting contribution was less the hardware than the algorithms it forced into existence. The A* search algorithm - now a standard method for finding least-cost paths - was published by Peter Hart, Nils Nilsson, and Bertram Raphael of SRI in 1968 as “A Formal Basis for the Heuristic Determination of Minimum Cost Paths” in IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics. The STRIPS automated-planning system also came out of the Shakey work. Both remain foundational in robotics and AI.
Shakey is now in the collection of the Computer History Museum and was inducted into Carnegie Mellon’s Robot Hall of Fame in 2004.