12 AI Milestones: 1. Shakey The Robot

Developed at the Artificial Intelligence Center of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) from 1966 to 1972, SHAKEY was the world's first mobile intelligent robot. According to the 2017 IEEE Milestone citation, 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." In November 1963, Charles Rosen, head of the AI group at SRI, wrote a memo in which "he proposed development of a mobile'automaton' that would combine the pattern-recognition and memory capabilities of neural networks with higher-level AI programs," according to Nils Nilsson in his book The Quest for Artificial Intelligence. In April 1964, SRI submitted to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) at the U.S. Department of Defense, a proposal for research in "Intelligent Automata," which it claimed would ultimately lead to "the development of machines that will perform tasks that are presently considered to require human intelligence."