Shakey works the room

The dawn of the computer age opened up new possibilities in robotics. Shakey, a robot developed by SRI International in the 1960s, was mobile, had a television camera for computer vision, touch sensors, and was connected via a radio link to a minicomputer. It never became a practical product, but Shakey and mobile robots like it gave researchers a platform for developing software for navigating an unknown space, as well as other artificial intelligence applications, according to the Computer History Museum.