Although Google’s success with the driverless technology has been remarkable, the history of driverless cars dates back to more than 50 years. For example, an early representation of the autonomous car was Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit sponsored by General Motors at the 1939 World’s Fair, which depicted electric cars powered by circuits embedded in the roadway and controlled by radio. Later, in the 1980s, a vision-guided Mercedes-Benz robotic van, designed by Ernst Dickmanns and his team at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, Germany, achieved 100 km/h on streets without traffic. Also, in the 1980s the DARPA-funded autonomous land vehicle (ALV) in the US achieved the first road-following demonstration that used laser radar (Environmental Research Institute of Michigan), computer vision (Carnegie Mellon University and SRI), and autonomous robotic control (Carnegie Mellon University) to control a robotic vehicle up to 30 km/h.
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