
In 1991, Congress authorized $650M to make driverless cars a reality (2013) - jameslk
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-national-automated-highway-system-that-almost-was-63027245/
======
andrewstellman
When I was studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon in the '90s, I played
bass in a band, and the guitar player was a grad student at the Robotics
Institute working on the autonomous vehicle project, the reason CMU was part
of the consortium in the article. NavLab 2 was an Army Humvee with a laser
scanner mounted on the front, along with some cameras and a bunch of other
sensors, and some powerful-at-the-time computers (Sun SPARCstations, IIRC) in
back. It was a pretty impressive sight:
[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/ahs/images/navlab_1_5_images/n...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/ahs/images/navlab_1_5_images/navlab2.color.small.gif)

It was usually parked in the Field Robotics garage, but if you went out early
on a weekend morning, you might catch it driving itself slowly around Schenley
Park (which is right next to CMU campus) – without anyone at the wheel, which
was really unreal and sci-fi-ish at the time.

I remember one story of a jogger who was surprised to suddenly run across it.
The story goes that the he or she screamed and actually fainted. The truck was
programmed to stop if it found itself in front of any obstacle, so when the
jogger came to, there was the truck looming above.

I have no idea if the story is actually true, but I like it anyway.

~~~
arama471
For anyone else having trouble loading the image:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160920032328/https://www.cs.cm...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160920032328/https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/ahs/images/navlab_1_5_images/navlab2.color.small.gif)

That's pretty incredible - they let it run unsupervised? Or did the jogger
just faint for a very short time period?

~~~
andrewstellman
I remember it running autonomously on the little roads in Schenley Park, which
were wide just enough for the vehicle but not open to traffic. Unfortunately,
I never learned what happened to the jogger.

------
bane
One the problems with government run transportation R&D is that the
responsible agencies are fundamentally not in the R&D business. DoT and
subordinate agencies like the FAA are regulatory and risk management
organizations (with some mandates in inspection, construction and
telecommunications). They lack the expertise, structure and know-how to build
effective Research and Development programs and to overcome their own
institutional risk management culture. For example, the FAA has been trying to
roll-out a new air traffic control system for decades and at a cost that
regularly far overruns any estimates the Agency can put together.

The DoD, DoE and the Intelligence Agencies have dedicated R&D arms (DARPA,
IARPA, ARPA-E, etc.) with long legacies of knowing how to to research and
shepherd it into operational development states and/or commercialization. Even
other parts of the civilian government has things like the NSF,

The closest the civilian world has for transportation is maybe NASA? But for
self-driving cars, the DoT's R&D components are not well organized and seen
very much as side-show "Administrations" and are generally new affairs. DOT's
version of DARPA is called "RITA" and was formed only in 2005 by strapping
together a handful of previous organizations inside of DoT and are focused
mostly on, you guessed it, improving safety and studying statistics.

It's no wonder that most of the government research that's actually made
progress in this area have all come from DARPA.

~~~
skywhopper
I think you're missing a few factors. Most critically, DARPA has some success
because they have a customer (the DoD) with specific requirements and a nearly
unlimited source of funding compared to any other government initiative. The
Defense Department probably wastes more money each year on meandering,
unfinishable snake-oil projects than has been spent on driverless car R&D by
all entities in all of history.

But it's true that driverless car tech is unlikely to come out of direct
government funding. Instead, that money should be going to fund quality
education at all levels, and to build proven technologies that would solve
many of the same problems the driverless-car pipe dream would only be an
inferior version of--ie high speed rail links in the middle distance where
it's a better form of transport than cars (driverless or not) and planes.

~~~
Retric
Driverless cars are directly coming out of DARPA funding ex:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge).
Google for example can trace it’s program directly back to DARPA.

Companies are more willing to fund after the basic proof of physical
possibility shows up. Vs the kind of this might be possible in 30 years
projects DARPA gets off the ground.

PS: It’s often just as much about people getting experience working on these
problems as it is any specific technology.

------
diminish
We invented horseless auto mobile but required continuous human attention for
steering and managing the machine. With a horse indeed we already had semi-
driverless operation in some scenarios.

We are reinventing the "horse" \- sometimes I think.

~~~
spullara
I often remark that people really did want a faster horse.

~~~
ars
How hard would it be to put an actual horse in control of a car?

You get the speed of a car, and the self driving of the horse (or some other
animal).

~~~
starbeast
Here's a brief history tracking the progress of developments in that area. I'm
not sure where this tech lies on the Gartner Hype Curve though.

Pigeon controls missile -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon)

Horse drives car - [https://www.horseandhound.co.uk/videos/news-
videos/buttersco...](https://www.horseandhound.co.uk/videos/news-
videos/butterscotch-horse-driving-car-kentucky)

Goldfish controls robot -
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/robot_goldfish_tank...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/robot_goldfish_tank/)

edit to add one more as I realised that one of my favorite 'most worrying tech
developments' fits right in...

Rat neurons cultured on silicon substrate control robot -
[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401756/rat-brained-
robot/](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401756/rat-brained-robot/)

------
null000
> Needless to say, the program didn’t deliver driverless cars and automated
> highways to Americans. So what was the problem? The legislation didn’t
> really give the Department of Transportation any direction on how they
> should go about the research—only that they needed to demonstrate it by
> 1997. But perhaps the biggest problem was that the legislation never clearly
> defined what was meant by “fully automated highway system.”

Look a lot more like the problem was that there just wasn't any follow
through. Prototypes were made, tests were done, proofs of concept made, but
$650M is not enough to overhaul an entire nation's infrastructure, and one
shortish strip of highway isn't enough to convince people to go out and buy
whole new cars.

------
jameslk
I found this article linked to a video someone posted here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18755243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18755243)

The video is also pretty interesting:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlZEeIC_2lI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlZEeIC_2lI)

~~~
77pt77
> In the future, which may be 10, 50 years from now, there won't be a driver

@1997

21 years are gone.

> You'll be able to read the newspaper on your way to work.

Yeah. About that...

~~~
oldgradstudent
The opening titles are even better:

> Highways of the future may feature relaxed drivers, talking on the phone,
> _faxing documents_

~~~
77pt77
> talking on the phone

Again, they were not completely wrong...

------
agumonkey
In early 90s, BMW had a working prototype IIRC. Something quite elaborate even
though the processing power was limited. Kodak moment.

~~~
blattimwind
I believe one of the earliest non-guided (so actually autonomous) self driving
cars was the Vamors by Dickmanns in the 80s. IIRC it used one or two racks
stuffed with transputers to run the machine vision and control software. Later
there was the Euroka project based off that.

> ... achieved in 1995, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class
> Mercedes-Benz took a 1,000 miles (1,600 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
> kilometres per hour (109 mph) on the German Autobahn, with a mean time
> between human interventions of 9 kilometres (5.6 mi). In traffic it executed
> manoeuvres to pass other cars. Despite being a research system without
> emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 kilometres (98 mi)
> without any human intervention.

~~~
sokoloff
I worked the spring and summer of 1991 at Daimler-Benz as an intern on their
autonomous vehicle (VITA, a 7-ish meter bus at the time). This was the 2nd
generation bus and I think the immediate predecessor to the S-class mentioned
in parent comment. We’d sometimes test in Munich or Turin with the other
European auto marquees, but mostly tested on an abandoned stretch of Autobahn
just outside of Stuttgart.

I worked on the vision system (as in [under the direction and guidance of my
boss] wrote all the code to improve frame rate from 5Hz to 10Hz, double the
processing resolution (to around 128x96 IIRC), and implemented Kalman
filtering for preceding vehicle detection and ranging). System was built in
Occam on Inmos transputers. Each was about $15K and roughly the power of a 486
but with fast, reliable message passing. We could auto drive (lane follow and
distance keep only) using only vision, but not especially reliably; it would
fault and give up every 3-15 minutes, depending on lighting and roadway
conditions. Partially wet, drying roadways remained a big problem as I left at
the end of the summer.

Really cool internship. Part of
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project)

VITA image: [https://goo.gl/images/Cz8ZuZ](https://goo.gl/images/Cz8ZuZ)

~~~
agumonkey
I wonder how fast did these companies ran to their archive department to find
notes from that project when Google, Tesla et al started to pitch level5 auto-
automation.

ps: Also did you know about the pseudo self driving system made in the US
(50s) by embedding a radio wire in the road so the car above could stay in
lane ?

~~~
sokoloff
Didn't know about the radio guidance; will have to google it.(I do know about
the 4-course aviation radio nav systems, but am not old enough to have flown
them.)

With regards to quickly searching the archives, I suspect all the major
manufacturers have had a reasonably steady, perhaps varying in intensity,
advanced research group. So, it's probably less searching the archives and
rather just asking the grizzled engineers in those groups...

------
jokoon
I was watching First Man recently, the movie about the first moon landing.

I'm wondering how much the popularity of computers changed how SpaceX was able
to develop its software and properly analyze the data. I guess it made things
easier, but to be honest I have no idea how hard NASA worked its computers and
systems to use data in the 60.

------
Tsubasachan
I always find it hilarious that they test drive autonomous vehicles in
Arizona. Never in Tokyo or Amsterdam.

~~~
btian
Why? If they don't work in Arizona, they won't work anywhere else.

If AV doesn't work in Tokyo, they may still work in many places.

~~~
scarejunba
I think this sort of illustrates just how hard iterative development is for
most people to grasp. It's similar to how junior engineers frequently aim for
the final finished product on the first iteration whereas most experienced
engineers will iterate on development when in unfamiliar spaces.

------
YesThatTom2
No. No. No!

This can’t be true!

I like driverless cars. My libertarian friends tell me that nothing the
government does is good.

Theeefore this cant possibly be true.

Same thing with the internet.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Despite the sarcasm, this is a good point. Which revolutionary technologies
have __not __been developed with public money?

~~~
icelancer
That the government spends a shitload of money on basically everything under
the sun doesn't mean that public investment is always a good idea. The
Internet was very largely developed by the private sector; despite public
underpinnings of the infrastructure, the private sector would have brought it
along in time as well and the result would have been largely the same.

~~~
acdha
The private sector was the phone company, and their vision was quite
different. Without huge amounts of federal funding creating operating system
support, tools, and operational practice the future might have looked at lot
like CompuServ or AOL. I don’t know whether they still have it but the old
displays at Epcot used to be a fascinating warped-mirror alternative history.

