The Evolution of Vision-based Unmanned Ground Vehicles: the VisLab Perspective

Unmanned ground vehicles are one of the enlightening ideas that will shape our future by providing enhanced safety and improved mobility. Although the development of prototypes is still going on, we are now assisting to demonstrations that witness the real applicability of the early concepts. T HE history of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) developed in the last 20-25 years. In fact, although the first ideas were born in the sixties, the level of maturity of the technology at that time did not allow to afford the original goal of implementing fully autonomous all-terrain all-weather vehicles. The first documented prototypes of automated vehicles were developed by a few groups in the military arena in the mid eighties. The initial stimulus that had triggered these innovative ideas had been provided by the military sector, who was eager to provide complete automation to its fleet of ground vehicles. It was not before the eighties that this interest was then transferred to the civil sector: governments worldwide launched the first projects which conveyed a large number of researchers over these topics. But the interest of the automotive industry in developing real products-and thus investing money in this new business-started to develop only when the feasibility studies were successfully over and the first prototypes were demonstrated. The test of autonomous vehicles on real roads in a real environment was one of the most important milestones in the history of unmanned ground vehicles. This happened in the mid-late nineties. We are now assisting to a flourishing of research initiatives oriented to intelligent vehicles. Anyway, due to many technological issues and legal considerations, full autonomy was not set as a goal: the automotive industry feels as its primary goal the need to equip vehicles with supervised systems and-more generally-ADAS (Advanced Driving Assistance Systems) instead of automatic pilots. At the same time the research on UGVs then slowed down, since it was not felt as a primary strategic area of investment any more by neither industry nor governments. Departments of Transportation worldwide were in fact primarily interested in social, economic, or environmental objectives aimed at enhancing the efficiency of fuel, road network, and improving the quality of life in terms of mobility. The good results reached by ADAS in the car market in the last years induced the military sector to give a new vigorous push to the original ideas of automating its fleet of ground vehicles. The …