History of the Research on Vehicle Automation in Japan

The second part of the book provides an historical overview of the research on vehicle automation in Japan. After an introduction to the Japanese industrial policy and the beginning mass motorization after WWII, several chapters detail the first experiments on automated driving using guidance cables that were started in 1961 by the Government Mechanical Laboratory in Higashi-Murayama. After a chapter about a rail-based Computer Controlled Vehicle System (CVS), the following chapter presents the research of the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory (MEL) that developed in the 1970s the worlds first vision-based automobile, called Intelligent Vehicle. A Toyota Crown was equipped with TV-cameras that detected lateral guard rails. It functioned without modification of the road infrastructure and without off-board computing. The next chapter details the large-scale demonstrations of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) in Japan after the mid-1980s. An experimental vehicle with machine vision, called Personal Vehicle System (PVS) had been created by MITI in 1987. It ran autonomously along straight lines using cameras, lidar and ultrasonic for lane and obstacle detection. The Ministry of Construction initiated in 1995 an Automated Highway System (AHS)-program, leading to the first Japanese AHS-demonstration. The Ministry of Transport launched in 1991 the Advanced Safety Vehicle-project, focusing on vehicle based sensing and active safety assistance systems. This trend to vehicle-based automation concepts led to several demos. The end of the chapter is dedicated to a project of the Japanese automotive industry.