SRI International’s first mobile general-purpose robot, developed in the 1960s, was named Shakey.
Shakey was built at the Stanford Research Institute, now called SRI International, between 1966 and 1972. It combined sensors, onboard computing, movement, and symbolic artificial intelligence, allowing it to reason about actions rather than simply repeat a fixed sequence.
The robot could navigate rooms, avoid obstacles, push objects, and plan routes using a model of its surroundings. Its slow movements reflected the limited computing power of the period, but its software ideas influenced later work in robotics and artificial intelligence.
Shakey is sometimes confused with Stanford’s later autonomous vehicle experiments or with industrial robots, which generally performed fixed tasks in structured environments. Shakey’s important distinction was its attempt to operate flexibly in changing surroundings.