Shakey the Robot

Shakey maneuvers around obstacles

From 1966 through 1972, SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center conducted research on a mobile robot system nicknamed “Shakey.” Endowed with a limited ability to perceive and model its environment, Shakey could perform tasks that required planning, route-finding, and the rearranging of simple objects. Although the Shakey project led to numerous advances in AI techniques, many of which were reported in the literature, much specific information appears only in a series of previously relatively inaccessible SRI technical reports.

Shakey had a TV camera, a triangulating range finder, and bump sensors, and was connected to DEC PDP-10 and PDP-15 computers via radio and video links. Shakey used programs for perception, world-modeling, and acting. Low-level action routines took care of simple moving, turning, and route planning. Intermediate level actions strung the low level ones together in ways that robustly accomplished more complex tasks. The highest level programs could make and execute plans to achieve goals given it by a user. The system also generalized and saved these plans for possible future use.

In 1969, the demonstrations of Shakey were collected in a 24-minute film, “SHAKEY: Experimentation in Robot Learning and Planning." (see link to the right)

The Shakey project team.

The possibilities of computer science and artificial intelligence caught the public's imagination. After an April 10, 1968, article in The New York Times about Shakey and two other robot efforts (at MIT and Stanford University), Life magazine referred to Shakey as the “first electronic person” in 1970. In November 1970, the National Geographic Magazine also carried a picture of Shakey in an article on the present uses and future possibilities of computers.

Originally, Shakey was controlled by a SDS-940 computer acquired in 1966 with 64K 24-bit words of memory. Programmed in Fortran and Lisp, Shakey's problem solving was done in QA3. This was replaced by a “large” PDP-10 around 1969 with 192K 36-bit words of memory. STRIPS was then used for problem solving, with QA4 developed later. When the movie was made, Shakey's programs occupied over “300,000 36-bit words” (~1.35MB).

Shakey was elected to the Carnegie Mellon's Robot Hall of Fame in 2004.

It is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Shakey with callouts