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Back To the Future: Autonomous Driving In 1995
First time accepted submitter 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 (look that one up), 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."
Same for me. The text seems to be white on white background which makes it hard to read...
the equivalent of a 486DX2 (look that one up)...
If they wanted the minivan to go faster, they just hit the PC's "turbo" button.
The original 486DX was released in 1989 and ran at 20mhz. It included a FPU, previously an add-on coprocessor on x86 chips.
Then, the 486SX was released, which disabled the FPU and was offered at speeds as slow as 16mhz.
The 486DX topped out at 50mhz, but then on-chip clock doubling was offered as the 486DX2, raising speeds up to 66mhz. Then clock tripling, finishing up at 100mhz with the 486DX4.
Earlier boxes had turbo buttons because they could shift back into a nominally PC/PC/XT compatible 4.77mhz (in the case of 8088/8086 boxes) or PC/AT compatible 6 or 8mhz (in the case of 286/386 boxes). It actually had a good reason - many early games were highly dependent on the system's clock speed.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Ah the halcyon days of autonomous vehicles in 1995; i remember them well. Myself? I owned a self-driving Chevrolet caprice that could automatically shift from park by deleting a piece of transmission. Once it performed this feat it could transport itself directly into a parking lot bollard. My friend even owned a prototype Ford Taurus that could gracefully enter reverse and slide down a hillside into the waiting embrace of a large mailbox and come to rest in a fast food parking lot. At the time you might imagine most drivers were shocked by such amazing mechanics and computing prowess and of course this meant constant explanation. Most witnesses had a tough time comprehending such wildly futuristic transportation, and honestly my biggest complaint was trying to explain such an exotic feature to police who seemed absolutely incapable of understanding.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I think the point was that they could have made autonomous driving cares for 20 years.
However... I expect there are a bunch of other factors.
1. 3,000 miles isn't really a lot of miles, over a 4 month time frame. I expect it was only tested in ideal conditions.
2. Software quality in 1995 was horrible! Not just with microsoft windows. But with Unix systems as well, these systems were touting 99% uptime. So that is a 1% failure rate... or 3.65 failures per year.
3. Lack of interests. We were in SUV height. Cheap gas, and everyone wanted to go off roading.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Aye.
The olde 486 DX2... I remembereth that well. If thou hadst one, thou will belike many fond mem'ries playing classic MS-DOS games on it.
A meaneth brach 'twas too. capable of running yea the most demanding titles without breaking a sweateth. I cri'd when i had to puteth mineth down due to corky age.
I ran Linux on one in my dorm room. At the same time we had several at work running Windows 95 and later Windows 98.
I think maybe we did have one that ran Dos + Win3.1 but it was the exception.
Ahh... those were good days. PCs were still very expensive but I had access to cheap parts and coud undercut just about anybody's price. There is nothing like a thick steel "built like a tank" AT era-case with an only slightly out of date motherboard and hard drives just big enough to hold what you really need inside at a time when an up to date PC would have set you back a couple of grand. You could use those things for target practice and still get your homework done on them.
My curiosity is pairing a 486 with a GPS receiver. The GPS likely had a faster proc than a 486.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Actually, the tech was licensed to a company which is now part of a major auto supplier. It is hard to say whether the exact tech is being used in that supplier's current product line but it was certainly the basis for the earlier versions of the product.