Shakey the Robot was the first general-purpose mobile robot able to reason about its own actions. While other robots would have to be instructed on each individual step of completing a larger task, Shakey could analyze commands and break them down into basic chunks by itself.
Shakey in 1972
Peter Hart discussed Shakey's firsts in a talk at Google in February 2015.
Shakey's creators at the IEEE Milestone award event at the Computer History Museum, February 2017: (from left) Richard O. Duda, Tom Garvey, IEEE President Elect Jim Jeffries, Peter E. Hart, Nils J. Nilsson, Richard Fikes, Helen Chan Wolff, Claude Fennema, Bertram Raphael, Mike Wilber.
SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Entrance to SRI International headquarters in Menlo Park
SRI participant Paul Magill discussing the smog on Black Friday in Los Angeles at the first National Air Pollution Symposium in 1949
The ERMA system, which uses magnetic ink character recognition to process checks, was one of SRI's earliest developments.
The first prototype of a computer mouse, as designed by Bill English
