Submission + - Back to the Future: Autonomous Driving in 1995 (roboticstrends.com)
stowie writes: This autonomous Pontiac Trans Sport minivan that drove 3,000 miles was built over about a four-month time frame for under $20,000. We had one computer, the equivalent of a 486DX2, a 640x480 color camera, a GPS receiver, and a fiber-optic gyro. It’s funny to think that we didn’t use the GPS for position, but rather to determine speed. In those days, GPS Selective Availability was still on, meaning you couldn’t get high-accuracy positioning cheaply. And if you could, there were no maps to use it with! But, GPS speed was better than nothing, and it meant we didn’t have to wire anything to the car hardware, so we used it.
