In 1989, the Berlin Wall began to fall, the World Wide Web made its debut, Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” topped the charts, and in Pittsburgh, a retrofitted Army ambulance called ALVINN was driving around Carnegie Mellon University without any human intervention.
Self-driving cars may seem like a very recent technological phenomenon, but researchers and engineers have been building vehicles that can drive themselves for over three decades. Research on computer controlled vehicles began at Carnegie Mellon in 1984 and production of the first vehicle, Navlab 1, began in 1986. ALVINN, which stands for Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network, was used as a test vehicle well into the 1990s.
This proto-driverless vehicle came up recently in a Twitter discussion between two engineers: Oliver Cameron, who heads an open source self-driving car project at Udacity, and Dean Pomerleau, a CMU professor who ran the self-driving car project that gave birth to ALVINN. Cameron tweeted a video shared by some of his students of a car steering itself autonomously using only a camera.
Two students, participating in a @udacity Self-Driving Car challenge, produced an incredible model to steer a car using deep learning. pic.twitter.com/tZazM7tqj0
— Oliver Cameron (@olivercameron) November 23, 2016
This prompted Pomerleau to ask a few questions about deep learning and neural networks. After some back and forth, Pomerleau brought up ALVINN, which had an operating system of 100 million floating point-operations per second, or about one-tenth the processing power of the Apple Watch. The vehicle’s CPU was the size of a refrigerator and was powered by a 5,000 watt generator, he added. Nonetheless, ALVINN was able to hit 70 mph by the early 1990s.