Flakey the robot was a research robot created at

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic ...

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 ...

and was the successor to

Shakey the robot 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 ...

Software

Most of Flakey's routines were written in Lisp, with some lower-level code written in C. The code maintains a "Local Perceptual Space" that is updated by the sensors and acted on by planning algorithms.

Hardware

It was about 3 feet tall and 2 feet wide, and included 12 sonar sensors, optical wheel encoders, a video camera, and a depth-finding laser.

Research results

Flakey was used to demonstrate fuzzy logic and goal-oriented behavior - it would take what it knew and work towards one of several goals. At the first

AAAI 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 ...

robotics competition in July 1992, Flakey took second place and the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

's CARMEL took first, above Georgia Tech's "Buzz" and IBM's "TJ2".

References

{{reflist SRI International Historical robots Rolling robots Robots of the United States 1985 robots