I've been in that autonomous vehicle, although it wasn't moving at the time. Their road-follower worked only in very good circumstances.<p>The amazing thing is how much progress there's been in CPU power. That thing took three racks of computers, and a crew of 5, to drive 5 MPH. They had a 3D LIDAR, though, with a line scanner and a tilting mirror. That was better than most of the LIDAR units until recently.
Now easily replicable (in smaller form) with a smartphone and an Arduino:<p><a href="http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar/</a><p>Interesting story behind the creation of that: David Singleton was one of my "classmates" in Andrew Ng's ML Class in the Fall of 2011 - I was both amazed and pleased that he managed to create this demonstration after we had played around with building a neural network using Octave, and after seeing the many video clips (about ALVINN) that were a part of the class that showed how it worked.<p>That class ultimately led to the founding of Coursera - the class the Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig were running at the same time (AI Class) let to Udacity. Coursera still offers that original ML Class (called something else now).<p>As a part of Udacity's Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree, one of the projects in the first term was to get a simulated car to drive around a track. Many (if not most) of us chose to implement NVidia's End-to-End CNN approach (there were also a few that repurposed ImageNet) - either in whole or in a modified form. Ultimately, with the right amount of training and datasets, the car would drive well around the track.<p>I find it amazing how far we've come in the short amount of time between that ML Class course and today, in the development of machine learning. I just hope we don't fall into another winter that'll take a decade or more to pull back out of...
This ALVINN promotional video is a good demonstration of the (1989) technology: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilP4aPDTBPE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilP4aPDTBPE</a>
Basically the same core design as Tesla autopilot and other autonomous software today... but the hardware to make a useful finished product just weren't available yet. Way ahead of it's time.