Self Driving Cars

Past - Present - Future

Last updated: 2019/02/16

THe past

The driverless dream begins

It didn’t take long after the birth of the motorcar for inventors to start thinking about autonomous vehicles. In 1925, the inventor Francis Houdina demonstrates a radio-controlled car, which he drives through the streets of Manhattan without anyone at the steering wheel. According to the New York Times, the radio-controlled vehicle can start its engine, shift gears, and sound its horn, “as if a phantom hand were at the wheel.”

John McCarthy’s robo-chauffeur

In 1969, John McCarthy — a.k.a. one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence — describes something similar to the modern autonomous vehicle in an essay titled “Computer-Controlled Cars.” McCarthy refers to an “automatic chauffeur,” capable of navigating a public road via a “television camera input that uses the same visual input available to the human driver.”

No Hands Across America

In the early 1990s, Carnegie Mellon researcher Dean Pomerleau writes a PhD thesis, describing how neural networks could allow a self-driving vehicle to take in raw images from the road and output steering controls in real time.

ALVINN - Learning to STEER

Jupyter Notebook demonstrating the algorithm

Open directly in Google Colaboratory

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The Verge - Meet ALVINN, the self-driving car from 1989

RALPH - Adaptive Learning

Jupyter Notebook demonstrating the algorithm

Open directly in Google Colaboratory

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RALPH: Rapidly Adapting Lateral Position Handler

The Grand Challenge is too challenging

In 2002, DARPA announces its Grand Challenge, offering researchers from top research institutions a $1 million prize if they can build an autonomous vehicle able to navigate 142 miles through the Mojave Desert.

Urban Scenario Using Stereo Vision

Autonomous Ground Vehicles designed for dynamic environments require a reliable perception of the real world, in terms of obstacle presence, position and speed.

PROUD2013 Driverless Car Test

Google searches for an answer

Starting in 2009, Google begins developing its self-driving car project, now called Waymo, in secret. The project is initially led by Sebastian Thrun, the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google Street View.

THe Present

The big car manufacturers dive in

Old and New companies

Top self driving cars startups

Sensors

Sensors/Actuators

SUBSYSTEMS and COmmunication

AI comes to self-driving cars

At CES 2018, Nvidia unveiled a new self-driving car chip called Xavier that will incorporate artificial-intelligence capabilities.

The leaders Trying to impress

Why Alphabet Will Win the Driverless-Car Race

OPen SOURCE platforms/INITIATIVES

SDC From 0 to 60 (*) in 4 weeks

OPen SOURCE platforms/INITIATIVES (cont)

Safer assisted technology Before full autonomy

The Guardian approach that Toyota Research Institute has been following, will bring safer autonomous systems

Open Source SDC components/platforms will improve collaboration across all participants in this growing industry

THe FUTURE

A fair view

Jack Stilgoe, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College London, joins David to discuss improper and irresponsible testing of autonomous vehicles

Self-Driving Cars Won’t Save Cities

Self-Driving cars hold immense technological promise, but they won’t fundamentally solve problems like congestion, at least for now.

End to end NAVIGATION - second try

We define a novel variational network capable of learning from raw camera data of the environment as well as higher level roadmaps to predict (1) a full probability distribution over the possible control commands; and (2) a deterministic control command capable of navigating on the route specified within the map.