Shakey the robot

Last updated
Shakey the mobile robot
Shakey.png
Shakey the Robot in its display case at the Computer History Museum
Manufacturer SRI International
Year of creation1966 - 1972
Replaced by Flakey the robot

Shakey the Robot was the first general-purpose mobile robot able to reason about its own actions. While other robots would have to be instructed on each individual step of completing a larger task, Shakey could analyze commands and break them down into basic chunks by itself.

Contents

Due to its nature, the project combined research in robotics, computer vision, and natural language processing. Because of this, it was the first project that melded logical reasoning and physical action. Shakey was developed at the Artificial Intelligence Center of Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International).

Some of the most notable results of the project include the A* search algorithm, the Hough transform, and the visibility graph method.

History

Shakey was developed from approximately 1966 through 1972 with Charles Rosen, Nils Nilsson and Peter Hart as project managers. Other major contributors included Alfred Brain, Sven Wahlstrom, Bertram Raphael, [1] Richard Duda, Richard Fikes, Thomas Garvey, Helen Chan Wolf and Michael Wilber. The project was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) based on a SRI proposal submitted in April 1964 for research in “Intelligent Automata.” [2] [3]

Now retired from active duty, Shakey is currently on view in a glass display case at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. [4] The project inspired numerous other robotics projects, most notably the Centibots.

Software

Shakey in 1972 SRI Shakey with callouts.jpg
Shakey in 1972

The robot's programming was primarily done in LISP. The Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver (STRIPS) planner it used was conceived as the main planning component for the software it utilized. As the first robot that was a logical, goal-based agent, Shakey experienced a limited world. A version of Shakey's world could contain a number of rooms connected by corridors, with doors and light switches available for the robot to interact with. [5]

Shakey had a short list of available actions within its planner. These actions involved traveling from one location to another, turning the light switches on and off, opening and closing the doors, climbing up and down from rigid objects, and pushing movable objects around. [6] The STRIPS automated planner could devise a plan to enact all the available actions, even though Shakey himself did not have the capability to execute all the actions within the plan personally.

An example mission for Shakey might be something like:

"An operator types the command "push the block off the platform" at a computer console. Shakey looks around, identifies a platform with a block on it, and locates a ramp in order to reach the platform. Shakey then pushes the ramp over to the platform, rolls up the ramp onto the platform, and pushes the block off the platform. Mission accomplished."

Hardware

Physically, the robot was particularly tall, and had an antenna for a radio link, sonar range finders, a television camera, on-board processors, and collision detection sensors ("bump detectors"). [7] The robot's tall stature and tendency to shake resulted in its name:

We worked for a month trying to find a good name for it, ranging from Greek names to whatnot, and then one of us said, 'Hey, it shakes like hell and moves around, let’s just call it Shakey.'

—  Charles Rosen [7]

Research results

Peter Hart discussed Shakey's firsts in a talk at Google in February 2015. Peter Hart Shakey talk.jpg
Peter Hart discussed Shakey's firsts in a talk at Google in February 2015.

The development of Shakey provided far-reaching impact on the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as computer science in general. Some of the more notable results include the development of the A* search algorithm, which is widely used in pathfinding and graph traversal, the process of plotting an efficiently traversable path between points; the Hough transform, which is a feature extraction technique used in image analysis, computer vision, and digital image processing; and the visibility graph method for finding Euclidean shortest paths among obstacles in the plane. [8]

Media and awards

Shakey's creators at the IEEE Milestone award event at the Computer History Museum, February 2017: (from left) Richard O. Duda, Tom Garvey, IEEE President Elect Jim Jeffries, Peter E. Hart, Nils J. Nilsson, Richard Fikes, Helen Chan Wolff, Claude Fennema, Bertram Raphael, Mike Wilber. IEEE Shakey Team at dedication of IEEE plaque commemorating their achievement.jpg
Shakey's creators at the IEEE Milestone award event at the Computer History Museum, February 2017: (from left) Richard O. Duda, Tom Garvey, IEEE President Elect Jim Jeffries, Peter E. Hart, Nils J. Nilsson, Richard Fikes, Helen Chan Wolff, Claude Fennema, Bertram Raphael, Mike Wilber.

After SRI published a 24-minute video in 1969 entitled "SHAKEY: Experimentation in Robot Learning and Planning", [9] the project received significant media attention. [4] This included an April 10, 1969 article in the New York Times ; In 1970, Life referred to Shakey as the "first electronic person"; and in November 1970 National Geographic Magazine covered Shakey and the future of computers. [4] The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's AI Video Competition's awards are named "Shakeys" because of the significant impact of the 1969 video. [10]

Shakey was inducted into Carnegie Mellon University's Robot Hall of Fame in 2004 alongside such notables as ASIMO and C-3PO. [11] [12] [13]

Shakey has been honored with a prestigious IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing. [14] [15]

Shakey was showcased in the BBC – Towards Tomorrow: Robot (1967) documentary.

Related Research Articles

A* is a graph traversal and pathfinding algorithm, which is used in many fields of computer science due to its completeness, optimality, and optimal efficiency. Given a weighted graph, a source node and a goal node, the algorithm finds the shortest path from source to goal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science</span> School for computer science in the United States

The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. As of 2022 U.S. News & World Report ranks the graduate program as tied for second with Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. It is ranked second in the United States on Computer Science Open Rankings, which combines scores from multiple independent rankings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raj Reddy</span> Indian-American computer scientist (born 1937)

Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy is an Indian-American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years. He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was instrumental in helping to create Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India, to cater to the educational needs of the low-income, gifted, rural youth. He was the founding chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He is the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award, in 1994, known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, for his work in the field of artificial intelligence.

In the history of artificial intelligence, neat and scruffy are two contrasting approaches to artificial intelligence (AI) research. The distinction was made in the 1970s and was a subject of discussion until the mid-1980s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SRI International</span> American scientific research institute (founded 1946)

SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.

Richard Earl Fikes is a computer scientist and Professor (Research) Emeritus in the Computer Science department of Stanford University. He is professionally active as a consultant and expert witness. He led Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory from 1991 to 2006, and has held appointments at Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Price Waterhouse Technology Centre, Xerox PARC, and SRI International.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bertram Raphael</span> American computer scientist (born 1936)

Bertram Raphael is an American computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nils John Nilsson</span> American computer scientist (1933–2019)

Nils John Nilsson was an American computer scientist. He was one of the founding researchers in the discipline of artificial intelligence. He was the first Kumagai Professor of Engineering in computer science at Stanford University from 1991 until his retirement. He is particularly known for his contributions to search, planning, knowledge representation, and robotics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Randal Bryant</span> American computer scientist (born 1952)

Randal E. Bryant is an American computer scientist and academic noted for his research on formally verifying digital hardware and software. Bryant has been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University since 1984. He served as the Dean of the School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon from 2004 to 2014. Dr. Bryant retired and became a Founders University Professor Emeritus on June 30, 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter E. Hart</span> American computer scientist and entrepreneur

Peter E. Hart is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He was chairman and president of Ricoh Innovations, which he founded in 1997. He made significant contributions in the field of computer science in a series of widely cited publications from the years 1967 to 1975 while associated with the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International, a laboratory where he also served as director.

Richard Jay Waldinger is a computer science researcher at SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center whose interests focus on the application of automated deductive reasoning to problems in software engineering and artificial intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manuela M. Veloso</span> Portuguese-American computer scientist

Manuela Maria Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research & Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.

Matthew Thomas Mason is an American roboticist and the former Director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Mason is a researcher in the area of robotic manipulation, and is the author of two highly cited textbooks in the field.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Any-angle path planning</span> Algorithm to find Euclidean shortest paths

Any-angle path planning algorithms are pathfinding algorithms that search for a Euclidean shortest path between two points on a grid map while allowing the turns in the path to have any angle. The result is a path that cuts directly through open areas and has relatively few turns. More traditional pathfinding algorithms such as A* either lack in performance or produce jagged, indirect paths.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sven Koenig (computer scientist)</span> German computer scientist

Sven Koenig is a full professor in computer science at the University of Southern California. He received an M.S. degree in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997, advised by Reid Simmons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Xing</span>

Eric Poe Xing is an American computer scientist whose research spans machine learning, computational biology, and statistical methodology. Xing is founding President of the world’s first artificial intelligence university, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).

G. Ayorkor Korsah is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Robotics at Ashesi University in Ghana.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Chan Wolf</span> Artificial intelligence pioneer

Helen Chan Wolf is an artificial intelligence pioneer who worked on facial recognition technology and Shakey the robot, the world's first autonomous robot, at SRI International.

References

  1. ↑ "Oral History: Bertram Raphael". IEEE Global History Network. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers . Retrieved 2012-10-08.
  2. ↑ Press, Gil. "12 AI Milestones: 1. Shakey The Robot". Forbes. Retrieved 2024-05-25.
  3. ↑ "Shakey the Robot". darpa.mil. Retrieved May 25, 2024.
  4. 1 2 3 "Shakey". SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center . Retrieved 2012-10-07.
  5. ↑ "Shakey the Robot". SRI International. Archived from the original on 2013-05-04. Retrieved 2012-10-07.
  6. ↑ Moravec, Hans (1998). "Caution! Robot Vehicle!". ROBOT: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. p. 27.
  7. 1 2 "Shakey". Exhibition: Artificial Intelligence & Robotics. Computer History Museum . Retrieved 2012-10-07.
  8. ↑ Lozano-Pérez, Tomás; Wesley, Michael A. (1979), "An algorithm for planning collision-free paths among polyhedral obstacles", Communications of the ACM, 22 (10): 560–570, doi: 10.1145/359156.359164 .
  9. ↑ "Shakey Video (320x212 - 24 min - RealVideo - 91.7 MB)". SRI International . Retrieved 2012-10-07.
  10. ↑ "AAAI Video Competition 2012". Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence . Retrieved 2012-10-07.
  11. ↑ "Shakey". Robot Hall of Fame 2004 Inductees. Carnegie Mellon University . Retrieved 2012-10-07.
  12. ↑ Hanlon, Mike (21 January 2004). "More inductees into the Robot Hall of Fame". Gizmag. Retrieved 2012-10-07.
  13. ↑ "Carnegie Mellon Inducts Second Class into Robot Hall of Fame". Carnegie Mellon University. 2004-10-11. Retrieved 2012-10-07.
  14. ↑ "SRI International's Shakey the Robot to be Honored with "IEEE Milestone" at the Computer History Museum" . Retrieved 2017-02-17.
  15. ↑ Perry, Tekla (17 February 2017). "SRI's Pioneering Mobile Robot Shakey Honored as IEEE Milestone". IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved 18 February 2017.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.