Micro Memories
by Edward Driscoll, Jr.
Micro Memories
Shakey — A 1960s Predecessor to
Today’s Advanced Robotics
Readers of Nuts & Volts and
especially SERVO — our
sister publication — know
first hand the remarkable strides that
robotics has made in the last 10
years or so.
Yet, as one developer told me,
robotics in the first decade of the
21st century are still very much akin
to where personal computers were in
the mid-1970s. Just as it took
decades of experimentation and
research to get to the first microcomputer, it has taken robots an equally
long gestation period to get to the
hobbyist level.
In the 1960s, it required enormous sums of capital just to
research robots. There were
essentially two groups doing
Shakey quietly resides in a Plexiglas case at the
Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
— it had a TV camera so that it could
see things and there was work on
getting it to tell where the edge of the
room was. It could recognize blocks.
It could find ramps and other things
like that.”
Beyond that, one of the goals of
the Shakey program was to build a
robot that could be given instructions that were less than step-by-step
and still have it figure out how to
accomplish its tasks. As Waldinger
says, its instructions wouldn’t say
“go here and then go there;” rather,
they would say “move this box to this
location.”
Shakey had no hands, but, as
Waldinger says, “it could push boxes
with its ‘stomach.’ It was like a
bulldozer; it could push boxes along
and the tasks that it could do had to
do with moving a box from one place
to another and, sometimes, there
were things that it had to move out of
the way in order to get through a
doorway.
In some cases, there were uncertainties; it would think that a box was
in place and then someone would
secretly move it and it would have to
adjust to contingencies that might
have interrupted its plans. , it was the
first time that a whole bunch of
different things were integrated into
one system.”
The Birth of Shakey
F
o
r
E
l
e
c
t
r
o
n
i
c
s
NUTS & VOLTS
E
v
e
r
y
t
h
i
n
g
research into robotics: one corporate
and the other using government
money. Dr. Joseph Engelberger was
developing the first robots for
automobile assembly lines — technology eagerly purchased by
General Motors and, later, by other
automobile manufacturers.
Meanwhile, Stanford Research
Institute (later known as SRI) —
located in Menlo Park, CA — was
working with ARPA, the Advanced
Research Projects Agency, the
central research and development
organization for the US government’s Department of Defense.
(Later, it became officially known as
DARPA. The added D stands for
Defense. In the late 1960s, it also
gave the world Arpanet, the direct
forerunner to today’s
Internet.)
The result was a
robot eventually known
informally — but lovingly
— as “Shakey” because
of its herky-jerky
motions. It became a
milestone in robotics
technology. As Dr.
Richard J. Waldinger of
SRI told me, its builders
had several objectives
for their robot. First, “it
was combining wholly
different elements in artificial intelligence into a
single thing. It did have
some English understanding, so you could
type commands into
Shakey in English and it
would type back in
English. And then there
was vision because it
could recognize objects
18
The robot was initially created
because Dr. Charles A. Rosen — who
led SRI’s applied physics lab — had a
remarkable idea in 1963. As his
colleague, Dr. Nils J. Nilsson, wrote
in a 1984 paper, “What would it be
like, he wondered, to build a large
learning machine whose inputs
SEPTEMBER 2004
