Autonomous cars: Past, present and future a review of the developments in the last century, the present scenario and the expected future of autonomous vehicle technology

The field of autonomous automation is of interest to researchers, and much has been accomplished in this area, of which this paper presents a detailed chronology. This paper can help one understand the trends in autonomous vehicle technology for the past, present, and future. We see a drastic change in autonomous vehicle technology since 1920s, when the first radio controlled vehicles were designed. In the subsequent decades, we see fairly autonomous electric cars powered by embedded circuits in the roads. By 1960s, autonomous cars having similar electronic guide systems came into picture. 1980s saw vision guided autonomous vehicles, which was a major milestone in technology and till date we use similar or modified forms of vision and radio guided technologies. Various semi-autonomous features introduced in modern cars such as lane keeping, automatic braking and adaptive cruise control are based on such systems. Extensive network guided systems in conjunction with vision guided features is the future of autonomous vehicles. It is predicted that most companies will launch fully autonomous vehicles by the advent of next decade. The future of autonomous vehicles is an ambitious era of safe and comfortable transportation.

1 Introduction

Consumers all around the whole world are enthusiastic about the advent of autonomous cars for public. An autonomous car can operate without human control and does not require any human intervention. Campbell et al. stated that modern autonomous vehicles can sense their local environment, classify different kinds of objects that they detect, can interpret sensory information to identify appropriate navigation paths whilst obeying transportation rules. Considerable advancements have been made in giving an appropriate response to unanticipated circumstances where either a backlash can occur in the vehicular systems or some medium in the external environment may not behave as predicted by internal prototypes. To carry out successful autonomous navigation in such situations, combining a variety of technologies from different disciplines that span computer science, mechanical engineering, electronics engineering, electrical engineering, and control engineering, etc. is significant (Deshpande, 2014). The time line of autonomous cars begins in 1926 with world's first radio controlled car- ‘Linriccan Wonder'. Significant advances in autonomous car technology has been made after the advent of the vision guided Mercedes-Benz robotic Van in 1980, since when the main focus has been on vision guided systems using LIDAR, radar, GPS and computer vision. This developed into the autonomous technologies present in modern cars like adaptive cruise control, lane parking, steer assist etc. And, in the future, we will be part of a future where fully autonomous cars will be a reality, based on official forecasts by various automobile companies.