History of the Research on Vehicle Automation in the United States

The first part of the book provides an historical overview of the research on vehicle automation in the United States. It starts with the early research on cable-based vehicle guidance by RCA and GM in the 1950s and details the Automated Highway System experiments of Ohio State University during the 1960s. The next chapter presents the academic research on mobile robots since the 1960s. Diving into the early days of artificial intelligence and providing a short historical portrait of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) the chapter then details the contribution of the mobile robots Stanford Cart and Shakey for autonomous driving. In the next step, the mobile robots of Carnegie Mellon University, developed in the 1980s to explore visual navigation, are presented. The technical concepts, successes and limits of the different NavLab-robot vehicles are discussed. The following chapters are interested in defense-related projects. The Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV) is presented, detailing the technical specifications, capabilities and hindrances of the experimental vehicle. The next chapter presents the Demo I-III program of the US-Army Research Lab in the 1990s. It had the goal to develop remotely controlled, semi- or fully autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV), operating without human presence on-board. The last chapter focuses on the development of Intelligent Transportation Systems in the US during the second half of the 1980s. Special emphasis is given to the research program Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH) in California.