ALVINN, an autonomous land vehicle in a neural network (1989) [pdf]

I&#x27;ve been in that autonomous vehicle, although it wasn&#x27;t moving at the time. Their road-follower worked only in very good circumstances.<p>The amazing thing is how much progress there&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.davidsingleton.org&#x2F;nnrccar&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.davidsingleton.org&#x2F;nnrccar&#x2F;</a><p>Interesting story behind the creation of that: David Singleton was one of my &quot;classmates&quot; in Andrew Ng&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t fall into another winter that&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ilP4aPDTBPE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;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&#x27;t available yet. Way ahead of it&#x27;s time.