July 2004 (Newstream) -- SRI International, an independent nonprofit research institute, today announced that Carnegie Mellon University has selected SRI's pioneering "Shakey" robot for induction into the Robot Hall of FameTM. Shakey and four other celebrated robots will be honored in a ceremony on October 11 at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Penn. Shakey was the first autonomous mobile robot capable of sensing its environment and then navigating its own course.

"SRI's Shakey was a true pioneer, showing that truly autonomous robotic behavior was feasible long before anyone else," said James Morris, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University professor of Computer Science and dean of the West Coast Campus.

"Shakey was the project that put the SRI Artificial Intelligence Center on the map," said Ray Perrault, Ph.D., AI Center director. "It really was fundamental, not only to robotics but to AI in general." SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center (AIC) developed Shakey over a six-year period beginning in 1966. The first mobile robot to visually interpret its environment, Shakey can locate items, navigate around them, and reason about its actions. Named for its erratic and jerky style of movement, Shakey stands six feet tall and is equipped with a TV camera, a triangulating range finder, bumpers, and a wireless video system. Today, the robot resides in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

"The mission of the Robot Hall of Fame is to credit the work of the early pioneers in robotics, such as SRI, and heighten public awareness of this science which has so many possibilities for helping people well into the future," said Rodney Brooks, Ph.D., director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Dr. Brooks serves on the jury charged with selecting the robots inducted each year. "I'm so pleased to see Shakey's substantial legacy and influence on today's work in artificial intelligence and robotics recognized through this honor."

This year's robots were selected by a jury with backgrounds in technology, science fiction and entertainment including Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, Inc.; Sir Arthur C. Clarke, writer and futurist; and Ruzena Bajcsy, a roboticist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Four other robots join Shakey as Robot Hall of Fame 2004 inductees: ASIMO, developed by Honda Motor Co. Ltd., the world's most advanced humanoid robot; Astroboy, the Japanese animation of a robot with a soul; C3PO, a character from the "Star Wars" series; and Robby the Robot from MGM's "Forbidden Planet." The Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover, Unimate, R2-D2, and HAL 9000 were inducted at the first annual induction ceremony in 2003.

The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University established the Robot Hall of Fame (www.robothallofframe.org) in 2003 to honor landmark achievements in robotics technology and the increasing contributions of robots to human endeavors. Two categories of robots are honored in the Robot Hall of Fame: Robots from Science - which have served a useful function and demonstrated real skills in accomplishing the purpose for which they were created - and Robots from Science Fiction. Shakey enters into the Hall of Fame this year in the Robots from Science category.

The Shakey project was led by the late Charles Rosen. Other major contributors include Nils Nilsson, Alfred Brain, Bertram Raphael, Richard Duda, Peter Hart, Richard Fikes, Richard Waldinger, Thomas Garvey, Jay Tenenbaum, and Michael Wilber. To view the historical Shakey documentary, visit www.ai.sri.com/movies/Shakey.ram

SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center

SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center is one of the world's major centers of research in artificial intelligence. Founded in 1966, the AIC has been a pioneer and a major contributor to the development of computer capabilities for intelligent behavior in complex situations. The Center's objectives are to understand the computational principles underlying intelligence in man and machines, and to develop methods for building computer-based systems to solve problems, to communicate with people, and to perceive and interact with the physical world.

The AIC has made many important contributions to the field over the decades, including:

Centibots: Under funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), SRI researchers created a team of 100 autonomous robots designed to conduct surveillance in hazardous areas, spot intruders and find "objects of value'' like prisoners or wounded people.
Project Halo: A long-term R&D initiative funded by Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc., the project aims to develop a "Digital Aristotle," which will function as a tutor capable of instructing and assessing students in the sciences, and as a research assistant with broad, interdisciplinary skills.
Flakey: The AIC's prize-winning, second-generation mobile robot, Flakey, had real-time stereovision algorithms to distinguish and follow people, and the DECIPHER speech recognition system to respond to spoken commands.
CONDOR: This system is an architecture for context-based machine vision, which was arguably the first significant vision system that explicitly represented and exploited context as the basis of its architecture.
The Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International has been a center of excellence and innovation for more than 35 years. The timeline at the following link shows just a few of the AIC's major achievements and milestones: www.ai.sri.com/timeline/