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Basically the same core design as Tesla autopilot and other autonomous software today... but the hardware to make a useful finished product just weren't availab

Basically the same core design as Tesla autopilot and other autonomous software today... but the hardware to make a useful finished product just weren't available yet. Way ahead of it's time.

tachyonbeam 10y ago
It's not just a matter of hardware. People didn't really know how to train neural networks more than 1-2 layers deep at the time. This is also before convolutional neural networks were invented by LeCun. This network is literally 30x32 pixels => two NN layers => steering decisions. No convolution, no semantic segmentation. It's a very cool technical demonstration, but we've come a long way since, on every front.
- omarforgotpwd 10y ago
  Yes, agreed. Software had also not advanced sufficiently.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cr0sh 10y ago
  ...and apparently it still took a good amount of time to train. If you dig enough thru the various papers and such written about ALVIIN, you'll find links to older projects, and a couple of "follow on" ones as well. One of the earlier projects that (I believe) led to ALVINN was the CMU Terragator - this was a custom 6-wheel chassis about the size of a large quad-cycle that was designed to navigate around the CMU campus. It was basically a testing platform for autonomous vehicle technologies. IIRC, this was around 1984 or so. After the Terragator, but prior to ALVINN (and ultimately led to the funding for ALVIIN) there was a project to develop a radio-controlled vehicle that could navigate through an unstructured environment (a cluttered alleyway, IIRC) called "DAVE". These projects and more are all referenced in the NVidia End-to-End CNN paper.
sgift 10y ago
Another project, with comparable design and objectives was EUREKA PROMETHEUS Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project), which lead to "VaMP": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaMP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaMP From the article: In 1994, the VaMP and its twin VITA-2 were stars of the final international presentation of the PROMETHEUS project in October 1994 on Autoroute 1 near the Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris. With a safety driver and guests on board, the twins drove more than 1000 km in normal traffic on the three-lane highway at speeds up to 130 km/h. They demonstrated lane changes left and right, autonomously passing other cars after maneuver approval by the safety driver. One year later, the autonomous Mercedes-Benz drove more than 1,000 miles (2,000 km) from Munich to Copenhagen and back in traffic at up to 180 km/h, again planning and executing maneuvers to pass other cars with safety driver approval. However, only in a few critical situations (such as unmodeled construction areas) a safety driver took over completely. Again, active computer vision was used to deal with rapidly changing street scenes. The car achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h on the German Autobahn, with a mean distance between human interventions of 9 km. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 km without any human intervention. Not too shabby for the 90s I'd say.

Basically the same core design as Tesla autopilot and other autonomous software today... but the hardware to make a useful finished product just weren't available yet. Way ahead of it's time.

tachyonbeam 10y ago

It's not just a matter of hardware. People didn't really know how to train neural networks more than 1-2 layers deep at the time. This is also before convolutional neural networks were invented by LeCun. This network is literally 30x32 pixels => two NN layers => steering decisions. No convolution, no semantic segmentation. It's a very cool technical demonstration, but we've come a long way since, on every front.

omarforgotpwd 10y ago
Yes, agreed. Software had also not advanced sufficiently.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cr0sh 10y ago
...and apparently it still took a good amount of time to train. If you dig enough thru the various papers and such written about ALVIIN, you'll find links to older projects, and a couple of "follow on" ones as well. One of the earlier projects that (I believe) led to ALVINN was the CMU Terragator - this was a custom 6-wheel chassis about the size of a large quad-cycle that was designed to navigate around the CMU campus. It was basically a testing platform for autonomous vehicle technologies. IIRC, this was around 1984 or so. After the Terragator, but prior to ALVINN (and ultimately led to the funding for ALVIIN) there was a project to develop a radio-controlled vehicle that could navigate through an unstructured environment (a cluttered alleyway, IIRC) called "DAVE". These projects and more are all referenced in the NVidia End-to-End CNN paper.

sgift 10y ago

Another project, with comparable design and objectives was EUREKA PROMETHEUS Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project), which lead to "VaMP": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaMP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaMP From the article: In 1994, the VaMP and its twin VITA-2 were stars of the final international presentation of the PROMETHEUS project in October 1994 on Autoroute 1 near the Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris. With a safety driver and guests on board, the twins drove more than 1000 km in normal traffic on the three-lane highway at speeds up to 130 km/h. They demonstrated lane changes left and right, autonomously passing other cars after maneuver approval by the safety driver. One year later, the autonomous Mercedes-Benz drove more than 1,000 miles (2,000 km) from Munich to Copenhagen and back in traffic at up to 180 km/h, again planning and executing maneuvers to pass other cars with safety driver approval. However, only in a few critical situations (such as unmodeled construction areas) a safety driver took over completely. Again, active computer vision was used to deal with rapidly changing street scenes. The car achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h on the German Autobahn, with a mean distance between human interventions of 9 km. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 km without any human intervention. Not too shabby for the 90s I'd say.