
RCA engineers envisioned automated electronic highways by 1975 - helloworld
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/selfdriving-cars-were-just-around-the-cornerin-1960
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Animats
The General Motors Firebird III had this in 1958.[1] It used wire-guided lane-
keeping. They expected lots of support from the road system.

In 1956, GM made a promotional film for self-driving cars.[2] It's a musical.
There's also GM's "Design for Dreaming".[3]

The modern version of such ads, from Volvo.[4]

[1] [https://youtu.be/xKOdux6Gjno?t=720](https://youtu.be/xKOdux6Gjno?t=720)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2iRDYnzwtk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2iRDYnzwtk)
[3]
[https://archive.org/details/Designfo1956](https://archive.org/details/Designfo1956)
[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwKuWz_lkE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwKuWz_lkE)

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nxzero
Back then, as now, the big issue is that driverless vehicles have to deal with
human drivers. Remove humans from the road, and the challenge gets
exponentially easier.

~~~
revelation
First we remove human drivers. Then we add electronic signalling systems, to
make the driverless vehicles work in all environmental conditions. Then we add
central control. Then we add X. Then we add Y.

Finally, we have reinvented the railroad. Amazing. I feel like the fact that
we don't have automated railroads (in practice) should tell us something about
the viability of the self-driving car. The problem for autonomous rail isn't
even technical anymore, it's regulatory.

~~~
CamperBob2
You forgot the part about spending trillions of dollars on dedicated tracks
that connect everyone's home, workplace, and shopping and entertainment
destinations. Fortunately, we already have those tracks; they're called
"roads."

Your incredulity at the fact that trains still have human operators involved
in any capacity at all, on the other hand, is spot-on. I'm with you 100%
there. Every time somebody wrecks a train because they were asleep or
distracted or texting or otherwise had better things to do, there is always a
giant thread on HN full of postings from train experts explaining why the
world would end if humans weren't involved in fixed rail operations.

It is indeed ridiculous that the same arguments -- whether they're valid or
not -- never seem to apply to autonomous road vehicles.

~~~
rusted_planet
I just don't understand, if the vehicle is totally autonomous how is it going
to get down my friends mile long driveway that is little more than two gravel
tracks with grass in the middle and find a place on his grass to park while
missing all the ruts.

I hear all this talk about better infrastructure, however what about the
places in the middle of nowhere.

I see more of the Tesla, with self drive being in the future. Kind of like the
movie demolition man.

~~~
Animats
_" I just don't understand, if the vehicle is totally autonomous how is it
going to get down my friends mile long driveway that is little more than two
gravel tracks with grass in the middle and find a place on his grass to park
while missing all the ruts."_

We could do that in 1985. We used to test our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle (a
Polaris Ranger ATV) at a horse ranch, and watched it climb dirt hills with
ruts and avoid ditches. You profile the terrain ahead with a LIDAR and choose
a driveable path. You can detect potholes, dropoffs, and ruts. You build a
height field from the sensor data and run a planner.

The hard part is out-driving the LIDAR range and going faster. You can't
profile terrain more than tens of meters away; you're looking at the ground at
an oblique angle and can't see holes and drop-offs. We didn't have an answer
for that. Stanford's team did; when the near part of the road profiled OK, and
the far part of the road looked like the near part of the road, they'd assume
the far road was drivable and speed up. We overdesigned the off-road
capability and went too slow. But we didn't crash. The vehicle was eventually
donated to UC Santa Cruz, where it was used for various projects for years.

The remaining hard problems all involve other road users.

------
ocdtrekkie
I remember growing up believing flying cars were just around the corner. As
today's children get their driver's licenses a decade from now, they'll think
about when they grew up believing self-driving cars were just around the
corner.

~~~
ingenter
There is a significant difference between self-driving cars in 1960, flying
cars and self-driving cars today.

Flying cars are doable, and there are several prototypes of a flying car.
However, flying cars aren't safe and aren't cost-effective.

Self-driving cars in 1960 require a significant infrastructure to operate, and
can't operate with human drivers. (Edit: Not to mention they don't exist)

Self-driving cars today _work_ , and are cost-effective, and it's likely that
they will be safer and create a much better traffic ecosystem than humans ever
will.

~~~
Hydraulix989
"Self-driving cars today work, and are cost-effective, and it's likely that
they will be safer and create a much better traffic ecosystem than humans ever
will."

Self-driving cars ONLY work on the immaculate freeways of California that they
are almost always (unfairly) tested on. Any precipitation renders the LADAR
sensors all but useless, and many everyday driving scenarios like "left turn
onto traffic" and "no lane markers" are still are far from being solved yet.

Any real improvements in the technology will be the result of fundamentally
different techniques than what the state-of-the-art is currently using (since
this is Hacker News: state-of-the-art really is just an "ad hoc" pipeline that
looks for things like "lane markers" using things like Canny edges along with
a PID controller for the steering wheel actuator, with some other "cheats"
like an over-reliance on human-compiled map data provided "a priori").

An end-to-end deep learning approach seems promising, but the current results
aren't even usable at this point.

Five years from now, every car (even my Jetta, not just luxury cars) will have
the equivalent of what Tesla's "auto pilot" looks like now, but a human in the
front seat will still very much be a necessity.

~~~
gfodor
You're making a lot of claims here about the current state of the art of self
driving tech. Presumably google has the best right now, so you must be talking
about them. Do you have insider information or are you just guessing? Because
it seems to me that the google self driving cars are capable of doing much
more than working on "the immaculate freeways of California."

edit: Also to be clear the driver assist features seen on cars like the model
s are not what most people are referring to when they talk about self driving
cars here.

~~~
Hydraulix989
"Also to be clear the driver assist features seen on cars like the model s are
not what most people are referring to when they talk about self driving cars
here."

Just saw your edit/addition, so I'm going to add more as well:

When did I even conflate them -- even if the state of the art is actually
"driver assist" as you've described?

Google’s self-driving cars aren’t “fully autonomous”. Without human drivers,
they’d lose control approximately every 1,500 miles, according to Google’s own
reports.

Can you guess how many driverless miles their "self-driving cars" have driven?

Hint: It's zero.

If you're curious, here is an example of a much more grounded academic talk
(read: not a TED talk) from 2015 by a renowned (in the autonomous vehicle
research community) Boston (not California) researcher who worked with Thrun
that corroborates the issues I've mentioned earlier:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs)

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IshKebab
I envision brain-machine interfaces by 2025. So what?

