Atlas record: https://www.aitimeline.dev/en/events/evt-0134/
Milestone · 1979
The Stanford Cart crosses a room
Hans Moravec's cart found its own way around a chair and cardboard obstacles in a room, building a map from pictures taken by a sliding camera.
Why it matters
Vision-based autonomous navigation worked, and showed its price: five hours for one room.
The camera travelled along a 50-centimetre rail and photographed the scene from about nine positions, after which the system computed distances to points and planned a route. The cart moved in one-metre lurches with ten to fifteen minute pauses for processing, and a run took three to five hours. The longest indoor run went about 16 metres around a chair and cardboard shapes before it met a cluttered wall. Moravec later stated the observation named after him: what is easy for a person is hard for a machine, and the reverse.
Event record
- Event date
- 1979
- Timeline date
- Event date
- Verification
- Sources gathered automatically · September 27, 2026
- Lines
- ID
- evt-0134
The runs were made in the last weeks before the AI lab moved in 1979; the thesis gives no closer date.
Related events
Earlier
- Related WABOT-1 1973
Two machines of the late 1970s running into the same cost of perception.
- Related Shakey 1969
The same idea of autonomous motion, but the navigation is built on stereo vision.
Later
- Contrasts Artificial potential fields avoid obstacles in real time 1985links to this record
The paper sets itself against collision-free path planners and names Moravec 1980 among them, the work the Stanford Cart came from: there the path was computed minutes ahead, here the obstacle is avoided inside the control loop.
- Related VaMoRs drives the Autobahn at 96 km/h 1987links to this record
The Stanford Cart of 1979 moved in one-metre bursts with quarter-hour pauses for processing; eight years later a 5-ton van drove itself down the Autobahn at 96 km/h on the same sense, vision, but with recursive state estimation instead of a full recomputation of the scene.
- Related Navlab: a van drives a road without stopping 1988links to this record
The same institute ten years after the Stanford Cart: Moravec had moved to Carnegie Mellon, and Navlab, a van rather than a cart, drives a road without stopping to process.
- Related The first RoboCup 1997links to this record
From one robot crossing a room in hours to a team acting in real time.