Shakey the Robot was the first general-purpose mobile
robot 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
Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the human ...
, and
natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...
. Because of this, it was the first project that melded logical reasoning and physical action. Shakey was developed at the
Artificial Intelligence Center
The Artificial Intelligence Center is a laboratory in the Information and Computing Sciences Division of SRI International. It was founded in 1966 by Charles Rosen and studies artificial intelligence. One of their early projects was Shakey the Robo ...
of Stanford Research Institute (now called
SRI International).
Some of the most notable results of the project include the
A* search algorithm
A* (pronounced "A-star") is a graph traversal and path search algorithm, which is used in many fields of computer science due to its completeness, optimality, and optimal efficiency. One major practical drawback is its O(b^d) space complexity, ...
, the
Hough transform
The Hough transform is a feature extraction technique used in image analysis, computer vision, and digital image processing. The purpose of the technique is to find imperfect instances of objects within a certain class of shapes by a voting proce ...
, and the
visibility graph In computational geometry and robot motion planning, a visibility graph is a graph of intervisible locations, typically for a set of points and obstacles in the Euclidean plane. Each node in the graph represents a point location, and each edge repr ...
method.
History
Shakey was developed from approximately 1966 through 1972 with
Charles Rosen
Charles Welles Rosen (May 5, 1927December 9, 2012) was an American pianist and writer on music. He is remembered for his career as a concert pianist, for his recordings, and for his many writings, notable among them the book '' The Classical St ...
,
Nils Nilsson and
Peter Hart as project managers. Other major contributors included Alfred Brain, Sven Wahlstrom,
Bertram Raphael
Bertram Raphael (born 1936) is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence.
Early life and education
Raphael was born in 1936 in New York. He received his bachelor's degree in physics from the Rensselaer ...
,
Richard Duda,
Richard Fikes
Richard Earl Fikes (born October 4, 1942) is a computer scientist and Professor (Research) Emeritus in the Computer Science department of Stanford University. He is professionally active as a consultant and expert witness. He led Stanford's Know ...
, Thomas Garvey,
Helen Chan Wolf
Helen Chan Wolf is an artificial intelligence pioneer who worked on facial recognition technology and Shakey the robot, the world's first autonomous robot, at SRI International.
Career
In the early 1960s Wolf worked with Charles Bisson and ...
and Michael Wilber. The project was funded by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Adv ...
(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
Centirobots, or simply centibots, were robots created around 2003 and designed to coordinate in large numbers in order to achieve a single goal, an early example of swarm robotics. The $2.2 million project was sponsored by DARPA and had principal ...
.
Software
The robot's programming was primarily done in
LISP. The
Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver (STRIPS) planner it used was conceived as the main planning component for the software it utilized. As the first robot that was a logical, goal-based agent, Shakey experienced a limited world. A version of Shakey's world could contain a number of rooms connected by corridors, with doors and light switches available for the robot to interact with.
Shakey had a short list of available actions within its planner. These actions involved traveling from one location to another, turning the light switches on and off, opening and closing the doors, climbing up and down from rigid objects, and pushing movable objects around. The STRIPS automated planner could devise a plan to enact all the available actions, even though Shakey himself did not have the capability to execute all the actions within the plan personally.
An example mission for Shakey might be something like:
"An operator types the command "push the block off the platform" at a computer console. Shakey looks around, identifies a platform with a block on it, and locates a ramp in order to reach the platform. Shakey then pushes the ramp over to the platform, rolls up the ramp onto the platform, and pushes the block off the platform. Mission accomplished."
Hardware
Physically, the robot was particularly tall, and had an antenna for a radio link,
sonar range finders, a television camera, on-board processors, and collision detection sensors ("bump detectors").
The robot's tall stature and tendency to shake resulted in its name:
Research results
The development of Shakey provided far-reaching impact on the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as computer science in general. Some of the more notable results include the development of the
A* search algorithm
A* (pronounced "A-star") is a graph traversal and path search algorithm, which is used in many fields of computer science due to its completeness, optimality, and optimal efficiency. One major practical drawback is its O(b^d) space complexity, ...
, which is widely used in
pathfinding
Pathfinding or pathing is the plotting, by a computer application, of the shortest route between two points. It is a more practical variant on solving mazes. This field of research is based heavily on Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the s ...
and
graph traversal, the process of plotting an efficiently traversable path between points; the
Hough transform
The Hough transform is a feature extraction technique used in image analysis, computer vision, and digital image processing. The purpose of the technique is to find imperfect instances of objects within a certain class of shapes by a voting proce ...
, which is a feature extraction technique used in
image analysis,
computer vision
Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the human ...
, and
digital image processing; and the
visibility graph In computational geometry and robot motion planning, a visibility graph is a graph of intervisible locations, typically for a set of points and obstacles in the Euclidean plane. Each node in the graph represents a point location, and each edge repr ...
method for finding
Euclidean shortest path
The Euclidean shortest path problem is a problem in computational geometry: given a set of polyhedral obstacles in a Euclidean space, and two points, find the shortest path between the points that does not intersect any of the obstacles.
Two di ...
s among obstacles in the plane.
Media and awards
After SRI published a 24-minute video in 1969 entitled "SHAKEY: Experimentation in Robot Learning and Planning", the project received significant media attention.
This included an April 10, 1969 article in the ''
New York Times''; In 1970,
Life referred to Shakey as the "first electronic person"; and in November 1970
National Geographic Magazine covered Shakey and the future of computers.
The
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...
's AI Video Competition's awards are named "Shakeys" because of the significant impact of the 1969 video.
Shakey was inducted into
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technolog ...
's
Robot Hall of Fame
The Robot Hall of Fame is an American hall of fame that recognizes notable robots in various scientific fields and general society, as well as achievements in robotics technology. The organization was established in 2003 by the School of Comput ...
in 2004 alongside such notables as
ASIMO and
C-3PO
C-3PO () or See-Threepio is a humanoid robot character in the '' Star Wars'' franchise who appears in the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy and the sequel trilogy. Built by Anakin Skywalker, was designed as a protocol droid intended to ...
.
Shakey has been honored with a prestigious
IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing.
Shakey was showcased in the BBC – Towards Tomorrow: Robot (1967) documentary.
References
Further reading
*
*
External links
SRI page on ShakeySRI educational film demonstrating ShakeyLIFE Magazine article (Nov. 20, 1970)Peter Hart talk covering the history and legacy of the project at the Computer History Museum where Shakey is displayed (2015){{DARPA, state=collapsed
Historical robots
History of artificial intelligence
Rolling robots
Robots of the United States
1972 robots
SRI International