Shakey was the first general-purpose mobile robot developed at Stanford Research Institute.
Built between 1966 and 1972, Shakey combined perception, planning, and movement rather than performing only one fixed mechanical task. It could create a representation of its surroundings and plan sequences of actions, such as navigating around obstacles or pushing objects.
The project linked robotics with artificial-intelligence research. Its software included STRIPS, a planning system developed by Richard Fikes and Nils Nilsson. Shakey’s work helped establish ideas about symbolic planning and the relationship between a robot’s goals, world model, and actions.
Shakey is sometimes confused with Stanley, the autonomous vehicle that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, or WABOT-1, a 1973 humanoid robot from Japan. Those systems belong to different projects and periods. Shakey’s distinctive contribution was combining mobile robotics with general-purpose symbolic reasoning.