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

Embodiment

ID

evt-0134

The runs were made in the last weeks before the AI lab moved in 1979; the thesis gives no closer date.

Sources

primary Obstacle Avoidance and Navigation in the Real World by a Seeing Robot Rover
Hans Moravec, Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University (author’s HTML edition) · Published March 1980
archive Stanford Cart
Computer History Museum

Related events

Related Shakey
The same idea of autonomous motion, but the navigation is built on stereo vision.
Related WABOT-1
Two machines of the late 1970s running into the same cost of perception.

Records that link to this one

Related The first RoboCup
From one robot crossing a room in hours to a team acting in real time.
Contrasts Artificial potential fields avoid obstacles in real time
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.
Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Manipulators and Mobile Robots (IJRR 1986)
Related VaMoRs drives the Autobahn at 96 km/h
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
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.