"Shakey," named for its less-than-stable gait, was developed by computer scientist Charles Rosen and his team at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) from 1966 to 1972. It was the first mobile robot to reason about its actions, such as locating a specific spot in a 7-room environment, finding designated boxes, pushing them together into groups according to instructions, and navigating while avoiding obstacles.

A planning system called STRIPS (“Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver”) reasoned about complex goals, such as “go to room D and push block nine over to where doorway 4 is.” The combination of AI programming that was based on pre-programmed software with error modulation, coupled with the navigation and vision (image) analysis, gave Shakey the power to understand and model its environment.

Although not a practical tool, it led to advances in AI techniques, including visual analysis, route finding, and object manipulation.…