Research · May 1969

Shakey

The SRI robot joined a camera, a planner and an executive: it built a model of the room, made a plan and carried it out, correcting as it went.

Why it matters

Perception, reasoning and action closed into one system for the first time, the scheme later called sense-plan-act.

Shakey moved through a simplified world of blocks and ramps, very slowly, and any perception error spoiled the plan. The project produced the A* algorithm, the STRIPS planner (1971) and practical line extraction. The approach's limit, recomputing the whole plan after any change, became the target of criticism in the 1980s.

Event record

Event date

May 1969

Timeline date

Event date

Verification

Sources gathered automatically · September 17, 2026

Lines

ID

evt-0114

Presented at IJCAI-69 in May 1969; work on the robot ran from 1966 to 1972.

Sources

primary A Mobile Automaton: An Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques
IJCAI-69 · Published May 1969
secondary 75 Years of Innovation: Shakey the Robot
SRI International

Related events

Builds on The A* algorithm
The robot's route planning rested on the algorithm described a year earlier.
A Mobile Automaton: An Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques
Builds on The resolution principle
Action planning was built on resolution theorem proving.
A Mobile Automaton: An Application of Artificial Intelligence Techniques

Records that link to this one

Builds on STRIPS
The planner grew out of controlling the Shakey robot and replaced theorem proving in it.
STRIPS: A New Approach to the Application of Theorem Proving to Problem Solving
Related WABOT-1
A second attempt in the same years to join perception, decision and motion in one body.
Related The Stanford Cart crosses a room
The same idea of autonomous motion, but the navigation is built on stereo vision.
Contrasts Subsumption architecture
The robot acts without building a world model, the step Shakey's scheme rested on.
A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot
Related Siri
The institution that built Shakey delivered a voice assistant forty years later.
Related Probabilistic roadmaps
Shakey planned actions in a world of a few blocks and searched paths with A*; here motion planning is for bodies with many degrees of freedom, where a grid for A* does not fit in memory.
Contrasts TAIR: a robot run by a neuron-like network
The paper sets its network against the framework of robot AI of the day, which it calls too narrow: most procedures do not admit inconsistent data and struggle in real time. Shakey is not named in the surviving text and the scan has no reference list, so this is a contrast of approaches, not a citation.
Transport Robot With Network Control System