27 years. The first famous "proof of concept" autonomous driving is Navlab (Thorpe, 1990). (Are there any prior projects?)
1989, ALVINN, an autonomous land vehicle in a neural network
A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups
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Re: A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups
#12In 2007 (when the first iPhone was released), it had been (at least) 15 years since "phones proved they could run apps" [1]. Knowing a limited version of something is possible doesn't tell you a lot about the road to commercialisation and widespread acceptance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#cite_ref-schneidawi...
Re: A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups
#13It was 13 years from the Wright Flyer to the first commercial fixed-wing aircraft. And that was still very dangerous. Jet engines (which really introduced the safety we are used to in airlines) took 50 years.
This analogy can't work in 21st century. First this is linear thinking, it does not take exponential progress into account. Second, in the case of Autonomous vehicles, the problem is purely software related and does not have any limitations in terms of hardware.
I don't know, it looks like it's holding true so far. If it was 13 years from the Wright brothers to the first commercial flight and now we're seeing 10 years from the "Wright brothers" of self driving cars to so far not having a commercial product.
Why do you think we are experiencing exponential progress in the area of self driving cars? Why do you think that the Wright brothers era weren't experiencing exponential progress with respect to the technology they needed to make commercial flight?
Finally, with hardware we normally only have to worry with 3 dimensions plus time. I guess fluid dynamics is kind of complicated, but we can at least put the thing into a wind tunnel. With software things can get more complicated because they're not constrained by physics anymore. But at least we have debuggers. With self driving cars we're going to have a support vector machine or a neuro net or something like that running. Some of these techniques can't even be debugged ... they just work or they dont. I'm not sure being free of the limitations of hardware is an asset.
Re: A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups
#14In 2007 (when the first iPhone was released), it had been (at least) 15 years since "phones proved they could run apps" [1]. Knowing a limited version of something is possible doesn't tell you a lot about the road to commercialisation and widespread acceptance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#cite_ref-schneidawi...
And proving that something is possible is far from proving that it is actually safe. 15 years after kittyhawk aircraft were widespread and common, but still deathtraps by our modern standards.
Re: A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups
#15Putting what everyone is saying more abstractly; solving a constraint satisfaction problem in a nice and closed domain should not make us surprised that it isn't as quick to deal with when lifted to an unbounded and messy space.
Re: A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
This analogy can't work in 21st century. First this is linear thinking, it does not take exponential progress into account. Second, in the case of Autonomous vehicles, the problem is purely software related and does not have any limitations in terms of hardware.
I don't know, it looks like it's holding true so far. If it was 13 years from the Wright brothers to the first commercial flight and now we're seeing 10 years from the "Wright brothers" of self driving cars to so far not having a commercial product. Why do you think we are experiencing exponential progress in the area of self driving cars? Why do you think that the Wright brothers era weren't experiencing exponential…
You can debug AI's by putting them in simulators and running them through many scenarios. What Google does.
Re: A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups
#17It was 13 years from the Wright Flyer to the first commercial fixed-wing aircraft. And that was still very dangerous. Jet engines (which really introduced the safety we are used to in airlines) took 50 years.
Pre-Jet flight wasn't exactly a suicide run. A turboprop plane with dual engines was as safe as a jet, fixed for a number of factors.
The larger benefit with jets is being able to fly much higher and faster and being able to hit the 30,000-35,000 sweet spot where the air is thinner, the plane is above storms, and jet fuel efficiency for typical planes is pretty good. The larger 'innovation' on the success of jets is the lowered cost per seat. Props at 10k altitude burned a lot of fuel and were slow which hurt their ability to get more fares. Safety didn't hold back the industry. Cost and speed did.
edit: applies to non-turbo prop as well
Re: A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups
#18I would argue that the 2004 DARPA challenge was a failure with the best car, Sandstorm, only going 7 miles before getting stuck on a rock. That led to a do-over in 2005 that was really the first success. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge#2004_Gra...
I would argue that no one who has commented in this thread so far has actually read the article.
Re: A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups
#19It was 13 years from the Wright Flyer to the first commercial fixed-wing aircraft. And that was still very dangerous. Jet engines (which really introduced the safety we are used to in airlines) took 50 years.
Pre-Jet flight wasn't exactly a suicide run. A turboprop plane with dual engines was as safe as a jet, fixed for a number of factors. The larger benefit with jets is being able to fly much higher and faster and being able to hit the 30,000-35,000 sweet spot where the air is thinner, the plane is above storms, and jet fuel efficiency for typical planes is pretty good. The larger 'innovation' on the success of jets is…
Turboprops were developed after jets.
But yeah there were other reasons planes got much safer after around the 1950s.
Re: A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups
#20I was just telling someone about this the other day. In college at UF, I produced dozens of video segments on engineering student projects, and the DARPA challenge was among the biggest deals, and that was now a decade ago. It wasn't on anybody's radars (so to speak). It's funny how even a little bit of progress suddenly flipped the concept into the popular imagination.