Flakey the robot was a research robot created at

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit scientific research, scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. It was established in 1946 by trustees of Stanford Univer ...

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 ...

and was the successor to Shakey the robot. It is featured in a

Scientific American Frontiers ''Scientific American Frontiers'' was an American science television program aired by PBS from 1990 to 2005. The show was a companion program to the ''Scientific American'' magazine, and primarily covered new technology and discoveries in science ...

episode (Season 5, Episode 1).

Software

Most of Flakey's routines were written in

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

, 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 Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth value of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and completely ...

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 The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...

'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