Shakey the Robot

From 1960 through 1972, the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI conducted research on a mobile robot system nicknamed Shakey. Endowed with a limited ability to perceive and model its environment, Shakey could perform tasks that required planning, route finding, and the rearranging of simple objects. Although the Shakey project led to numerous advances in AI techniques, many of which were reported in the literature, much specific in formation that might be useful in current robotics research appears only in a series of relatively inaccessible SRI technical reports. Our purpose here, consequently, is to make this material more readily available by extracting and reprinting those sections of the reports that seem particularly interesting, relevant and important.