Shakey was the Stanford robot completed in 1972 and widely described as the first mobile robot able to reason about its surroundings.
The project was conducted at the Stanford Research Institute, now known as SRI International, between 1966 and 1972. Shakey combined cameras, sensors, a radio link and a computer-controlled mobile platform. Unlike earlier machines that repeated fixed motions, it could construct a simplified representation of its environment and plan actions.
Researchers gave Shakey high-level tasks such as moving objects or navigating around obstacles. Its planning software decomposed those tasks into smaller actions, an important demonstration of symbolic reasoning connected to physical behavior.
Shakey was slow by modern standards and depended on a large remote computer rather than carrying powerful onboard hardware. It was not a humanoid robot and did not possess general human-like understanding. Its significance was the integration of perception, planning and movement in one experimental system, an approach that influenced later robotics and autonomous-agent research.