Shakey the Robot: The Wobbly 1960s Machine That Taught AI to Plan

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Life magazine called it the first electronic person in 1970. Shakey was a top-heavy stack of boxes on wheels, built at the Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center with DARPA money after a 1964 proposal for intelligent automata aimed at reconnaissance. It carried a television camera, sonar range finders, a radio antenna, and bump detectors. Project manager Charles Rosen watched it tremble across the floor, said it shakes like hell, and the name stuck.

This episode tells Shakey's story as a biography of a machine. The clumsy body mattered less than the mind inside it: software written in Lisp and a planner called STRIPS that reasoned backward from a goal to the steps required. Told to push a block off a platform, Shakey found a ramp, moved it into place, rolled up, and finished the job. The project ended in 1972, but the mathematics invented to make it work now guides map apps, video game characters, and self-driving cars.

Shakey lived in a carefully prepared world of mapped rooms, corridors, doors, and light switches, with painted baseboards to help its camera find the edges of a room.
The original design included two retractable arms, which the team scrapped because the robot could barely stay upright.
The A* search algorithm was created to route Shakey efficiently by adding the cost already traveled to an estimate of the distance remaining.
The Hough transform, developed so Shakey could turn camera pixels into straight lines and shapes, remains a staple of computer vision.
Shakey now sits in a glass case at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and joined Carnegie Mellon's Robot Hall of Fame in 2004 alongside ASIMO and C-3PO.

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