Shakey 2016 - How Much Does it Take to Redo Shakey the Robot?

Abstract

Shakey the robot was one of the first autonomous robots that showed impressive capabilities of navigation and mobile manipulation. Since then, robotics research has made great progress, showing more and more capable robotic systems for a large variety of application domains and tasks. In this letter, we look back on decades of research by rebuilding Shakey with modern robotics technology in the open-source Shakey 2016 system. Hereby, we demonstrate the impact of research by showing that ideas from the original Shakey are still alive in state-of-the-art systems, while robotics in general has improved to deliver more robust and more capable software and hardware. Our Shakey 2016 system has been implemented on real robots and leverages mostly open-source software. We experimentally evaluate the system in real-world scenarios on a PR2 robot and a Turtlebot-based robot and particularly investigate the development effort. The experiments documented in this letter demonstrate that results from robotics research are readily available for building complex robots such as Shakey within a short amount of time and little effort.