When will self-driving cars take over human-driving cars just like what it looks like in the tv series Upload? Perhaps we should first look at the history of self-driving cars and learn how the technology has evolved to where we are standing now.
The history of self-driving cars can be divided into four time periods:
- Before 1980: Pre Self-driving
- 1980s~1990s: The Beginning
- The 2000s: The Challenge Era
- The 2010s: Industry Thriving
Let us look into each era with several important events.
Before 1980: Pre Self-driving
- 1478: Leo Da Vinci designed a scratch for a self-propelled cart, which is later successfully built for the first time in 2004.
- 1939: General Motors (GM) announced its idea of building an autonomous highway plan for self-driving cars at the 1939 GM exhibit. They later came out with a prototype in 1958, which is infrastructure dependent in a way that the car is being controlled by the current flowing through a wire embedded in the road. This project was canceled in the 1970s since it was too pricy and the technology was not there yet.
1980s~1990s: The Beginning
- 1985: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) built the truck – autonomous land vehicle (ALV). It is the first self-driving car that was actually self-driving, and thus it marks the beginning of self-driving cars.
- 1987: Ernst Dickmanns created VaMoRs Mercedes Benz with two cameras which were capable of driving on a public highway traveling at speeds of about 60 mph. The computing speed was not fast enough to make it practical though.
- 1995: Navlab 5 developed by Carnegie Mellon University completed the project “No Hands Across America”. The car drove from Pittsburgh to San Diego for 3,000 miles.
The 2000s: The Challenge Era
- 2004: DARPA 1st Grand Challenge. No one completed the goal.
- 2005: DARPA 2nd Grand Challenge. Stanford won 1st place, while CMU won 2nd & 3rd places.
- 2007: DARPA Urban Challenge. It required the cars to drive 60 miles in less than 6 hours in some simulated urban courses. Some challenges such as negotiation with other vehicles and parking were involved.
- 2009: Google started its Google Car Project.
The 2010s: Industry Thriving
- 2013: 4 states in the US have approved the use of self-driving cars for testing purposes, including California, Nevada, Michigan, and Florida.
- 2015: Tesla released the Autopilot software update for Model S.
- 2016: The first fatality occurred in Florida using Tesla Autopilot. NuTonomy launched 1st self-driving taxi service in Singapore, followed closely by Uber in Pittsburgh
- 2018: A pedestrian was killed by an Uber autonomous car in Arizona. Waymo Spun out.
The abovementioned timelines are obviously not thorough. However, they do highlight some important milestones and events. We could see that it has only been less than 30 years since the first actual self-driving car was built. By studying history, we could learn how technology has evolved and possibly be motivated by their hard work.
There are a number of companies working on this problem nowadays. People are working hard to make the dream come true. Let us learn the existing technology together and perhaps one day, we will be able to contribute ourselves to the industry.