Autonomous Car - History

History

An early representation of the autonomous car was Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama exhibit sponsored by General Motors at the 1939 World's Fair, which depicted electric cars powered by circuits embedded in the roadway and controlled by radio.

In the 1980s a vision-guided Mercedes-Benz robotic van, designed by Ernst Dickmanns and his team at the Bundeswehr University Munich in Munich, Germany, achieved 100 km/h (62 mph) on streets without traffic. Subsequently, the European Commission began funding the €800 million EC EUREKA Prometheus Project on autonomous vehicles (1987–1995).

Also in the 1980s the DARPA-funded Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV) in the United States achieved the first road-following demonstration that used laser radar (Environmental Research Institute of Michigan), computer vision (Carnegie Mellon University and SRI), and autonomous robotic control (Carnegie Mellon and Martin Marietta) to control a robotic vehicle up to 30 km/h. In 1987, HRL Laboratories (formerly Hughes Research Labs) demonstrated the first off-road map and sensor-based autonomous navigation on the ALV. The vehicle travelled over 600m at 3 km/h on complex terrain with steep slopes, ravines, large rocks, and vegetation.

In 1994, the twin robot vehicles VaMP and Vita-2 of Daimler-Benz and Ernst Dickmanns of UniBwM drove more than one thousand kilometers on a Paris three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h, albeit semi-autonomously with human interventions. They demonstrated autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing of other cars.

In 1995, Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a 1600 km trip from Munich in Bavaria to Copenhagen in Denmark and back, using saccadic computer vision and transputers to react in real time. The robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h on the German Autobahn, with a mean time between human interventions of 9 km, or 95% autonomous driving. Again it drove in traffic, executing manoeuvres to pass other cars. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 km without human intervention.

In 1995, the Carnegie Mellon University Navlab project achieved 98.2% autonomous driving on a 5,000 km (3,100 mi) "No hands across America" trip. This car, however, was semi-autonomous by nature: it used neural networks to control the steering wheel, but throttle and brakes were human-controlled.

In 1996, Alberto Broggi of the University of Parma launched the ARGO Project, which worked on enabling a modified Lancia Thema to follow the normal (painted) lane marks in an unmodified highway. The culmination of the project was a journey of 2,000 km over six days on the motorways of northern Italy dubbed MilleMiglia in Automatico, with an average speed of 90 km/h. 94% of the time the car was in fully automatic mode, with the longest automatic stretch being 54 km. The vehicle had only two black-and-white low-cost video cameras on board, and used stereoscopic vision algorithms to understand its environment, as opposed to the "laser, radar - whatever you need" approach taken by other efforts in the field.

Three US Government funded military efforts known as Demo I (US Army), Demo II (DARPA), and Demo III (US Army). Demo III (2001) demonstrated the ability of unmanned ground vehicles to navigate miles of difficult off-road terrain, avoiding obstacles such as rocks and trees. James Albus at NIST provided the Real-Time Control System which is a hierarchical control system. Not only were individual vehicles controlled (e.g. throttle, steering, and brake), but groups of vehicles had their movements automatically coordinated in response to high level goals.

In 2010 VisLab ran VIAC, the VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge, a 13,000 km test run of autonomous vehicles. Four driverless electric vans successfully ended the drive from Italy to China, arriving at the Shanghai Expo on 28 October 2010. It was the first intercontinental trip ever with autonomous vehicles.

The ParkShuttle in Rotterdam is an example of a driverless car/minibus.

In 2006 the United Kingdom government's 'Foresight' think-tank revealed a report which predicts a RFID-tagged driverless cars on UK's roads by 2056, and the Royal Academy of Engineering claims that driverless trucks could be on Britain's motorways by 2019.

Autonomous vehicles have also been used in mining: Since December 2008, Rio Tinto Alcan has been testing the Komatsu Autonomous Haulage System - the worlds's first commercial autonomous mining haulage system - in the Pilbara iron ores mine, Western Australia. Rio Tinto has reported benefits in health, safety and productivity. In November 2011, Rio Tinto signed a deal to greatly expand its fleet of driverless trucks. Additional mining systems include Sandvik Automine (for underground loaders) and autonomous hauling from Caterpillar Inc.

Many automotive manufacturers such as General Motors, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Volvo, and Cadillac have begun testing driverless car systems:

• BMW is testing driverless systems since around 2005.
• In 2008, General Motors has stated that they will begin testing driverless cars by 2015, and they could be on the road by 2018. In 2011, GM created the EN-V (short for Electric Networked Vehicle).
• In 2010, Audi sent a driverless Audi TTS to the top of Pike’s Peak at close to race speeds.
• In 2011, Volvo has begun to develop an almost-autonomous 'road train' system for highways which could be integrated in cars by 2020.
• In 2011, Alan Taub, GM’s vice president of global Research and Development, stated that the company is planning to release semi-autonomous cars by 2015, and full autonomous cars by 2020.
• Volkswagen is currently testing a "Temporary Auto Pilot" (TAP) system that will allow a car to drive itself at speeds of up to 80 miles per hour on the highway.
• Ford is researching driverless systems and vehicular communication systems. Bill Ford predicts semi-autonomous driving with greater interaction between cars between 2017 and 2025 and fully autonomous vehicles beyond 2025.
• In 2011, Mercedes-Benz announced its 2013 S-Class will feature an autonomous driving system. At speeds of up to 25 mph, the S-Class will drive itself through slow-moving traffic jams using a series of cameras and radar-based monitoring systems controlling the speed and distance to the vehicle in front.
• In 2012, Audi announced plans to introduce a new autonomous driving system at speeds of up to 37 mph dubbed 'Traffic Jam Assistant'. The system will likely debut sometime before 2014 on the Audi A8.
• In 2012, Cadillac revealed their semi-autonomous system called "Super Cruise". The system could be ready for production vehicles by mid-decade.
• Other programs in the field include the 2getthere passenger vehicles from the Netherlands and the entrants of the DARPA Grand Challenge in the USA.

Although, as of 2012, fully autonomous cars are not yet available to the public, many models have features offering narrower functionality. These include adaptive cruise control (a system that monitors distances to adjacent vehicles in the same lane, adjusting the speed with the flow of traffic), available on over 30 models by various manufacturers; lane assist (a system that monitors the vehicle's position in the lane, and either warns the driver when the vehicle is leaving its lane, or, less commonly, takes corrective actions); and parking assist (a system that assists the driver in the task of parallel parking.)