Shakey: The First Electronic Person







In 2026, Tesla Optimus has become the de facto face of the new age Autonomous Robot revolution. Optimus is a 1.73 m, 57 kg, general-purpose humanoid robot designed for autonomous, repetitive, or dangerous tasks. It utilizes Tesla's EV battery technology, has end-to-end neural network AI capability based on Tesla FSD, and the ability to learn tasks by observing humans.










And though it is difficult to fathom, the first humanoid robot belongs to the 1960s, a full 60 years prior to 2026. “Shakey” is the first mobile robot with the ability to perceive and reason about its surroundings. It was physically mobile, and had elementary computer vision, and basic navigation capability. 

Shakey (https://www.sri.com/hoi/shakey-the-robot) was created from 1966-72 by the Artificial Intelligence Center at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International).

Shakey could perform tasks that required planning, route-finding, and the rearranging of simple objects. Shakey could perceive its surroundings, logically deduce implicit facts from explicit ones, navigate from place to place, make a plan to achieve a goal, monitor the execution of a plan in the real world, recover from errors in plan execution, improve its planning abilities through learning, and communicate in simple English.

Shakey greatly influenced modern robotics and AI techniques. After a 1968 article in The New York Times about Shakey and two other robot efforts (at MIT and Stanford University), Life magazine referred to Shakey as the “first electronic person” in 1970. In 1970, National Geographic also carried a picture of Shakey in an article on the present uses and future possibilities of computers. Shakey was elected to the Carnegie Mellon’s Robot Hall of Fame in 2004. Today, it resides in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California USA.

Interested in knowing more about Shakey, watch SRI’s video “Shakey the Robot: The First Robot to Embody Artificial Intelligence” on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bsEN8mwUB8

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