jan 1, 2005 - Self-Driving Cars Pass Their First Big Test

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The modern age of self-driving cars was launched on October 8, 2005, when a Volkswagen Touareg named “Stanley” won the second DARPA Grand Challenge — to complete a rough and often harrowing 131.2-mile course in the Mojave Desert within 10 hours. The race had been established the previous year by the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to spur competition and innovation in military autonomous vehicle tech, but none of the cars in the earlier competition had been able to go more than eight miles. What fueled Stanley’s victory was a constellation of improvements, including AI trained on the driving habits of real-world humans and five “Lidar” laser sensors, a technology that enabled the car to identify objects within a 25-meter range in front of the vehicle. Lidar, which stands for “light detection and ranging,” has since become a key component of robotic vision systems in cars and even some Kiva-style warehouse robots; in fact, the leading Lidar firm, Velodyne, was spun off from one of Stanley’s competitors in the race.

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