IEEE Milestone Dedication for SHAKEY: The First Robot With Artificial Intelligence

When I came to Santa Clara, CA in the Spring of 1970 the hottest topics were artificial intelligence and its manifestation in Shakey the robot. There were several IEEE talks per quarter on that topic at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park.

SHAKEY has had a huge impact on artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous vehicles. Technology used by the Mars rovers and in Google Maps is based on the Shortest Path Algorithm devised at SRI during SHAKEY's 1966-72 development period. This video is fun to watch.

An IEEE Milestone for SHAKEY The Robot will be dedicated at the Computer History Museum the evening of Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. The event will include an on-stage interview by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and historian John Markoff.

Plaque citation summarizing the achievement and its significance:

Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center developed the world’s first mobile intelligent robot, SHAKEY. It could perceive its surroundings, infer implicit facts from explicit ones, create plans, recover from errors in plan execution, and communicate using ordinary English. SHAKEY's software architecture, computer vision, and methods for navigation and planning proved seminal in robotics and in the design of web servers, automobiles, factories, video games and Mars rovers.

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The Sept 2015 IEEE CNSV talk on SHAKEY led Brian Berg to get approval of this Milestone.  Kuddos to Brian for that great work!