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.

[citation needed] Shakey was developed at the Artificial Intelligence Center of Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International).

[citation needed] Shakey was developed from approximately 1966 through 1972 with Charles Rosen, Nils Nilsson and Peter Hart as project managers.

The Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver (STRIPS) planner it used was conceived as the main planning component for the software it utilized.

A version of Shakey's world could contain a number of rooms connected by corridors, with doors and light switches available for the robot to interact with.

Physically, the robot was particularly tall, and had an antenna for a radio link, sonar range finders, a television camera, on-board processors, and collision detection sensors ("bump detectors").

Some of the more notable results include the development of the A* search algorithm, which is widely used in pathfinding and graph traversal, the process of plotting an efficiently traversable path between points; the Hough transform, which is a feature extraction technique used in image analysis, computer vision, and digital image processing; and the visibility graph method for finding Euclidean shortest paths among obstacles in the plane.