Shakey is a robot created at SRI International in California in the 1960's. It is a very well known early example of a robot that has the ability to see and model its 'world', plan, plot a route and perform simple tasks. It is also an important example of an hierarchical or deliberative control architecture. This type of control architecture organises the robot's 'brain' using the sequence sense, plan and act. Planning normally involves reading, creating or updating a world map and finding and following a route. This step in the sequence can be quite slow and given the computing power in the 1960's the reason for Shakey's name becomes apparent.
There is a lot of information about Shakey the robot on the SRI International's website, which includes video footage and some papers. It is important to learn about early robots because they give us an idea of where robotics has come from and helps us to see where it is heading, perhaps allowing us to revisit older ideas given newer technology.
Marshall Astor from San Pedro, United States, took this photo of Shakey which is now in the Computer History Museum, California, USA.
Looking at Shakey we can see that there are several important fields that immediately come together in the field of robotics that we will be interested in learning more about, hopefully some of which in this blog! Primarily we have to look at the construction of the robot - the field of mechatronics and the brain of the robot, which will cover both hardware - electronics and embedded systems and software - the field of artificial intelligence. We have a long way to go.
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