With several nations introducing self-driving cars in the 21st century, it seems the technology has evolved somewhere near the period. However, ALVINN is the self-driving car that came into existence long before in the early 90s in 1989.
This was the same period when the World Wide Web emerged to provide a huge chain of networks where people can sit at one place and browse any data at any time. ALVINN was a retrofitted army ambulance that operated in Pittsburgh. It was driven by self through the Carnegie Mellon University in 1989.
Evolution of ALVINN: Start Of Self-Driving Technology
The presence of ALVINN, a self-driving car without human intervention, has proven that the scientists have been planning new developments for a long time. The first report on the automated cars technology was published in the middle of the 70s, while, according to Motherboard, the first fully robotic van came into existence in the beginning of the 80s. The credit can be attributed to Ernst Dickmanns and his Budeshwr University team in Munich.
While Carnegie Mellon's technology led to the emergence of Terregator in the Atlantic in 1983. This was followed by a more advanced and improved machine vision algorithms. Hence, Carnegie Mellon's ALVINN came into existence in 1989. The first self-driving car used machine learning and observed human drivers. It tried to adapt its own strategies and became the fundamental principle behind the development of the new age self-driving technology.
ALVINN In 2017
According to The Verge, the name ALVINN grabbed attention following a mentionby two engineers on Twitter. Udacity's open source self-driving car project head Oliver Cameron and CMU professor Dean Pomerleau discussed ALVINN on the social mediasite. The latter was involved in the self-driving car project that led to the emergence of ALVINN. It was this discussion that proved that self-driving cars development is not a new phenomenon but a new and advanced form of the already existing technology.
