History of self-driving cars

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General Motors' Firebird II was described as having a "brain" that allowed it to move into a lane with a metal rod and follow it along.

Experiments have been conducted on self-driving cars since 1939;[1] promising trials took place in the 1950s and work has proceeded since then. The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab[2] and ALV[3][4] projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's Eureka Prometheus Project[5] in 1987. In 1988, William L Kelley patented the first modern collision Predicting and Avoidance devices for Moving Vehicles. Then, numerous major companies and research organizations have developed working autonomous vehicles including Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Continental Automotive Systems, Autoliv Inc., Bosch, Nissan, Toyota, Audi, Volvo, Vislab from University of Parma, Oxford University and Google.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] In July 2013, Vislab demonstrated BRAiVE, a vehicle that moved autonomously on a mixed traffic route open to public traffic.[13]

In the 2010s and 2020s, some UNECE members and EU members and the UK have some rules and regulations related to automated and fully automated cars: In Europe, cities in Belgium, France, Italy and the UK are planning to operate transport systems for driverless cars,[14][15][16] and Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain have allowed testing robotic cars in traffic.

In 2019 in Japan, related legislation for Level 3 was completed by amending two laws, and they came into effect in April 2020.[17] In 2021 in Germany, related legislation for Level 4 was completed.[18]

On 1 April 2023 in Japan, the amended "Road Traffic Act" which allows Level 4 was enforced.[19]

  1. ^ "'Phantom Auto' will tour city". The Milwaukee Sentinel. 8 December 1926. Retrieved 23 July 2013.[permanent dead link]
  2. ^ "Carnegie Mellon". Navlab: The Carnegie Mellon University Navigation Laboratory. The Robotics Institute. Retrieved 2014-12-20.
  3. ^ Kanade, Takeo (February 1986). "Autonomous land vehicle project at CMU". Proceedings of the 1986 ACM fourteenth annual conference on Computer science - CSC '86. pp. 71–80. doi:10.1145/324634.325197. ISBN 0897911776. S2CID 2308303.
  4. ^ Wallace, Richard (1985). "First results in robot road-following" (PDF). JCAI'85 Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-08-06.
  5. ^ a b Schmidhuber, Jürgen (2009). "Prof. Schmidhuber's highlights of robot car history". Retrieved 15 July 2011.
  6. ^ "Video Friday: Bosch and Cars, ROVs and Whales, and Kuka Arms and Chainsaws". IEEE Spectrum. 25 January 2013. Retrieved 26 February 2013.
  7. ^ "Audi of America > news > Pool > Reaffirmed Mission for Autonomous Audi TTS Pikes Peak". AudiUSA.com. Archived from the original on 10 July 2012. Retrieved 28 April 2012.
  8. ^ "Nissan car drives and parks itself at Ceatec". BBC. 4 October 2012. Retrieved 4 January 2013.
  9. ^ "Toyota sneak previews self-drive car ahead of tech show". BBC. 4 January 2013. Retrieved 4 January 2013.
  10. ^ "Google's Self-Driving Cars: 300,000 Miles Logged, Not a Single Accident Under Computer Control". The Atlantic. 2012-08-09. Retrieved 10 August 2012.
  11. ^ "Vislab, University of Parma, Italy - 8000 miles driverless test begins". Archived from the original on 14 November 2013. Retrieved 27 October 2013.
  12. ^ "VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge: Inaugural Ceremony – Milan, Italy". Archived from the original on 24 February 2021. Retrieved 27 October 2013.
  13. ^ "Vislab, University of Parma, Italy - Public Road Urban Driverless-Car Test 2013 - World premiere of BRAiVE". Archived from the original on 2015-09-02. Retrieved 2015-01-24.
  14. ^ "Driverless cars take to the road". E.U.CORDIS Research Program CitynetMobil. Archived from the original on 3 December 2013. Retrieved 27 October 2013.
  15. ^ "Snyder OKs self-driving vehicles on Michigan's roads". Detroit News. 27 December 2013. Archived from the original on 2 January 2014. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
  16. ^ "UK to allow driverless cars on public roads in January". BBC News. 2014-07-30.
  17. ^ Imai, Takeyoshi (December 2019). "Legal regulation of autonomous driving technology: Current conditions and issues in Japan". IATSS Research. 43 (4): 263–267. doi:10.1016/j.iatssr.2019.11.009.
  18. ^ "Germany: Road Traffic Act Amendment Allows Driverless Vehicles on Public Roads". Library of Congress. 9 August 2021. Retrieved 21 November 2021.
  19. ^ "Level 4 Autonomous Driving Allowed in Japan". Yomiuri Shimbun. 1 April 2023. Retrieved 3 April 2023.