CMU Robotics Institute
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2017–2024
2:04 · 44K views · Oct 13, 2016
A short CMU Robotics Institute clip on NavLab 1 from 1986, the first self-driving car to carry people on board. It was very slow but revolutionary for its era's computing power.
Cited as evidence that autonomous driving has been demonstrated for decades and that progress was slow.
3 comments from Hacker News
> " 15 years ago self driving of any sort was pure fantasy, yet here we are. " This was 38 years ago: this video - "NavLab 1 (1986) : Carnegie Mellon : Robotics Institute History of Self-Driving Cars; NavLab or Navigation Laboratory was the first self-driving car with people riding on board. It was very slow, but for 1986 computing power, it was revolutionary. NavLab continued to lay the groundwork for Carnegie Mellon University's expertise in the field of autonomous vehicles." This was 30+ years ago: [LINK] - "Short video about Ernst Dickmanns VaMoR and VaMP projects - fully autonomous vehicles, which travelled thousands of miles autonomously on public roads in 1980s." This was 29 years ago: [LINK] - "A South Korean professor [... Han Min-hong's] vehicle drove itself 300km (186 miles) all the way from Seoul to the southern port of Busan in 1995." This was 19 years ago: [LINK] - "DARPA Grand Challenge - 2005 Driverless Car Competition"
Driverless cars are a great example. Thirty years after the Navlab¹, and twenty after it did a travel from Washigton to San Diego mostly by itself², we still don't have a viable model that can safely navigate even an highway. But "human-level AI" is ten year away? To me, all these discussions sound like someone who read The Earth to the Moon in 1865 and started working on how to avoid getting humans harmed by the explosion in the barrel. ¹ this video ² [LINK]
There was one at CMU back in the 1980s, the NavLab. Autonomous vehicle with a crew of five. Three racks of workstations. Really, really slow.[1] [1] this video