ALV: the Strategic Computing land vehicle drives itself

In May 1985 the Autonomous Land Vehicle, which Martin Marietta was building for DARPA's Strategic Computing programme, drove a road by itself in public for the first time, about 1 km. In June 1986 it covered the whole test track, 4.2 km, at up to 10 km/h, and in October 1986 it first steered around obstacles while staying on the road and reached 20 km/h on a straight road without obstacles.

Martin Marietta Denver Aerospace won the integrating contract in August 1984; the University of Maryland supplied the vision algorithms for the first demonstration. On board were a colour video camera and an ERIM laser range scanner, with images processed on a VICOM processor. Leighty's report from the US Army Engineer Topographic Laboratories (March 1986) says that later in 1985 the vehicle travelled 2 km at 10 km/h, needing 1.75 seconds a frame, and that the VICOM was to be replaced by Carnegie Mellon's WARP systolic computer. DARPA's budget of February 1987, in its programme for fiscal 1987, describes road following at up to 20 km/h over various roads with obstacles on the WARP and Butterfly architectures. A discrepancy: Leighty's report describes the first demonstration of May 1985 as 1 km at 5 km/h, the Martin Marietta engineers' paper in IEEE PAMI (May 1988) as about 1 km at 3 km/h. That paper was read only in snippets from the Internet Archive's full-text search; the programme's annual reports and Martin Marietta's reports were not found. What the record does not claim: the programme's goals (5 km with obstacles in 1986, desert in 1987 and so on) as achieved, since Leighty's report gives them as plans. When and why the project ended.