The concept of automating vehicles started long ago. From 1930, people have been trying to automate cars and aircraft, but the hype of self-driving cars increased between 2004 and 2013. To encourage autonomous vehicle technology, the U.S. Department of Defense's research arm, DARPA, conducted a challenge called the Grand DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004. The aim of the challenge was to autonomously drive for 150 miles through a desert roadway. In this challenge, no team was able to complete the goal, so they again challenged engineers in 2007 (http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/), but this time, the aim was slightly different. Instead of a desert roadway, there was an urban environment spread across 60 miles. In this challenge, four teams were able to finish the goal. The winner of the challenge was Team Taran Racing from Carnegie Mellon University (http://www.tartanracing.org/). The second-place team was Stanford Racing from Stanford University (http://cs.stanford.edu/group/roadrunner/).
Here is the autonomous car that won the DARPA challenge:
After the DARPA Challenge, car companies started working hard to implement autonomous driving capabilities in their cars. Now, almost all car companies have their own autonomous car prototype. In 2009, Google started to develop their self-driving car project, now known as Waymo (https://waymo.com/). This project greatly influenced other car companies, and the project was lead by Sebastian Thrun (http://robots.stanford.edu/), the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (http://ai.stanford.edu/).
The car autonomously traveled around 2.7 million kilometers in 2016. Take a look at it:
In 2015, Tesla motors introduced a semi-autonomous autopilot feature in their electric cars. It enables hands-free driving mainly on highways and everything. In 2016, Nvidia introduced their own self-driving car (http://www.nvidia.com/object/drive-px.html), built using their AI car computer called NVIDIA-DGX-1 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/deep-learning-system.html). This computer was specially designed for the self-driving car and is the best for developing autonomous training driving models.
Other than self-driving cars, there are self-driving shuttles for campus mobility. A lot of startups are building self-driving shuttles now, and one of these startups is called Auro robotics (http://www.auro.ai/). Here is the shuttle they're building for campuses:
There is tremendous progress happening in self-driving car technology. Latest reports say that by the end of 2020, self-driving cars will conquer our roads (http://www.businessinsider.com/report-10-million-self-driving-cars-will-be-on-the-road-by-2020-2015-5-6?IR=T). One of the most common terms used when describing autonomous cars is a level of autonomy. Let's go through the different levels of autonomy used when describe an autonomous vehicle.