Nils John Nilsson

[2] He was the first Kumagai Professor of Engineering in computer science at Stanford University from 1991 until his retirement.

[2][3] Starting in 1966, Nilsson, along with Charles A. Rosen and Bertram Raphael, led a research team in the construction of Shakey, a robot that constructed a model of its environment from sensor data, reasoned about that environment to arrive at a plan of action, then carried that plan out by sending commands to its motors.

[2][3] Although the basic idea of using logical reasoning to decide on actions is due to John McCarthy,[7] Nilsson's group was the first to embody it in a complete agent, along the way inventing the A* search algorithm[8] and founding the field of automated temporal planning.

[2][3] In the latter pursuit, they invented the STRIPS planner,[9] whose action representation is still the basis of many of today's planning algorithms.

[2][3] In 1985, Nilsson became a faculty member at Stanford University, in the Computer Science Department.