On October 8, 2005, a modified Volkswagen Touareg named Stanley, built by the Stanford Racing Team led by Sebastian Thrun, completed a roughly 132-mile off-road course through the Mojave Desert with no human driver and won the DARPA Grand Challenge. The team’s own account of the system was published as “Stanley: The Robot that Won the DARPA Grand Challenge,” authored by Thrun and colleagues in the Journal of Field Robotics.
The DARPA Grand Challenge was a contest sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to spur development of autonomous ground vehicles. In the 2004 running, no vehicle finished. In 2005, five vehicles completed the course, with Stanley taking first place and the $2 million prize. The paper describes how Stanley used laser range finders, cameras, radar, and GPS, fused by probabilistic software and machine learning, to perceive the road and steer itself.
The win was a watershed moment for self-driving cars. Many of the researchers involved went on to lead autonomous-vehicle programs in industry, and the techniques of sensor fusion and learned perception demonstrated by Stanley became foundational to the field.