While we’re not all driving around in autonomous motors just yet, it’s not going to be long at the rate this industry is progressing. Back in 2004, when DARPA hosted its first ever driverless car competition, the future of autonomous driving looked bleak, to say the least. Out of the 15 teams that qualified for the final race, none managed to finish the course, and only four remained working. But, even as much of an epic failure as the first competition was it did spur many on to make their vehicle’s a whole lot better, and the following year five teams completed the whole course. By 2007, six teams had managed to complete the course successfully. That was the last year of the competition.
However, since then, several auto manufacturers and others have taken it on them to dive into this market including Google who has created a fully autonomous prototype. But the autonomous vehicles you see today are nothing like what they were, to begin with (thankfully):
– In the 2004 competition the Red Team’s car, called Sandstorm, made it the furthest out of anyone. The team was made up of Carnegie Mellon, Intel, Boeing, and others.
– SciAutonics II was a self-driving dune buggy that managed to get 6.7 miles before it got stuck in an embankment. It was backed by various Southern California Aerospace firms.
– The first ever to finish the race was Stanford’s vehicle, Stanley in the 2005 Grand Challenge. It completed the 132-mile race in just under seven hours using its five LIDAR lasers, GPS system, and video camera.
– In the last DARPA Challenge, the Urban Challenge, Carnegie Mellon teamed up with General Motors and Caterpillar to claim the $2 million first prize.
– Google released its self-driving car project in 2009, which also made use of sensors and software to guide them around. Then, just last year the company’s first-ever fully autonomous vehicle was unveiled. Although there are still safety drivers onboard all Google’s self-driving cars at the moment, the company are aiming for total autonomy eventually.
– And, what article on autonomous vehicles would be complete without mentioning Tesla? The company’s Autopilot technology is one of the best out there currently and includes automatic lane change, automatic parallel parking, automatic steering, and side collision warning.
So, as you can see, the progression of self-driving cars has come a long way over the past few years, and if it continues to accelerate at the same rate it is now, then in ten years time, we may never remember what it was once like to drive a car.
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