Autonomous Vehicles - KPIT

A. Stanford Cart - The First Smart Car
The first milestone in the area of research of
autonomous vehicle on road is the
introduction of Stanford cart, shown in Fig. 2.
The story behind Stanford cart is quiet
interesting. Mechanical Engineering (ME)
graduate student James L. Adams originally
constructed the Stanford Cart to support his
research on the problem of controlling a
remote vehicle using video information in the
year 1960-61 [1]. After the research, the cart
left unused in a Mechanical Engineering
laboratory until Les Earnest joined the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) as
Executive Officer in 1966. He found the cart
and decided to use it for making a robot road
vehicle using visual intelligence. However, the
radio channels and other electronic
equipment that had existed in the cart were not
working perfectly. Therefore, he recruited
Rodney Schmidt, who was a PhD student in
Electrical Engineering, to build a low power
television transmitter and radio control link to
undertake the visual guidance project.
SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab)
granted TV license for experimentation by the
Federal Communications Commission, which
helped to evolve the first smart car. The first
experimentation on the smart car began with a
human operator-controlling cart via computer
based on television images. Research
students drove the cart around the
neighbourhood without any human control. By
seeing the working of first smart car, Prof.
John McCarthy, Director of SAIL became
interested in the project and took over its
supervision [1]. The cart is rebuilt with KA10
processor and it ran at about 0.65 MIPS
(Million Instructions Per Second). They were
able to make the cart automatically follow a
high contrast white line under controlled
lighting conditions at a speed of about 0.8
mph. Later, the cart was re-built with greater
intelligence and image processing capabilities
by Hans Moravec. The car successfully
travelled through a room with obstacles in
about 5 hours. The Stanford cart ranked 10th
on Wired's list of the 50 best robots ever [7].
Figure 2: Stanford Cart configured as an
autonomous road vehicle at SAIL [1]
In 1977, Tsugawa and his colleagues at
Japan's Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering
Laboratory introduced the first truly
autonomous car, which could process images
on the road ahead. The car was equipped with
two cameras with analog signal processing.
By aiding through an elevated rail, the car was
able to run with a speed of 30 km/h (18.6 mph)
[7].
B. Test Vehicles for Autonomous Mobility
and Computer Vision
In 1980s, a German aerospace engineer Ernst
Dickmanns at Bundeswehr University located
in Munich, inaugurated a series of projects
called VaMoRs (Versuchsfahrzeug fuer
autonome Mobilitaet und Rechnersehen – in
German). The vehicle used for the projects
had two sets of cameras placed relative to
each other in both the front and the rear of
windshield to get a better vision. In addition,
there were two miniature CCD-cameras to
exploit the multifocal vision. There were 16-bit
Intel microprocessors and many other
sensors and software in the car. The car drove
with speed more than 90 km/h (56 mph) for
roughly 20 kms. He earned the sobriquet "The
pioneer of the autonomous car" for his efforts
[7].
Another project VaMP (Venus Atmospheric
Maneuverable Platform) was introduced after
seven years, with four cameras and out of that
2 cameras could process 320 by 240 pixels
TechTalk@KPIT, Volume 6, Issue 4, 2013
57