Nuts & Volts - September 2004

Micro Memories

make it obvious where the end of the wall was. If Shakey couldn’t see where the end of the room was, it was difficult to orient it.

Six Degrees of Shakey Separation

A mid-1960s photo from the Stanford Research Institute diagrams the key features of Shakey.

a couple of days later. So, in subsequent movies, they removed the clock from the wall.”

Because Shakey’s visual recognition system was far from perfect, it had problems recognizing where the wall ended and where the floor began, so, eventually, SRI painted the baseboard in the room where Shakey ran a darker color to

Shakey used loops of wires as "bump sensors," to alert him to when he was about to hit a wall or other obstacle.

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All technology has to begin somewhere and there’s a direct link between Shakey and the mobile robots of today. There may be other links as well: Waldinger remembers a presentation given to a group of high-rank-ing Army officials. One of them asked the men at SRI, “Could you attach a 36-inch blade to that thing?” The response was basically, “I don’t see why not!” That may have been the birth of Robot Wars, 30 years before its time.

Shakey has another amusing link to today’s technology. After DARPA terminated funding on Shakey in 1972, the robot sat in SRI’s lobby for several years before eventually ending up in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA (see the July 2001 issue of Nuts & Volts).

Nils Nilsson told me that, while Shakey was on display at SRI, various school groups would pass by Shakey, including one with a junior high school student named Bill Gates. Gates later told an associate at Microsoft, “I remember that — I was a junior high school student. I went to SRI and saw Shakey the Robot and it got me all excited about computers.”