I hadn't seen this before, really cool. Found more information on Wikipedia:

> In 1991, the United States Congress passed the ISTEA Transportation Authorization bill, which instructed USDOT to "demonstrate an automated vehicle and highway system by 1997." The Federal Highway Administration took on this task, first with a series of Precursor Systems Analyses and then by establishing the National Automated Highway System Consortium (NAHSC). This cost-shared project was led by FHWA and General Motors, with Caltrans, Delco, Parsons Brinkerhoff, Bechtel, UC-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Lockheed Martin as additional partners. Extensive systems engineering work and research culminated in Demo '97 on I-15 in San Diego, California, in which about 20 automated vehicles, including cars, buses, and trucks, were demonstrated to thousands of onlookers, attracting extensive media coverage. The demonstrations involved close-headway platooning intended to operate in segregated traffic, as well as "free agent" vehicles intended to operate in mixed traffic. Other carmakers were invited to demonstrate their systems, such that Toyota and Honda also participated. While the subsequent aim was to produce a system design to aid commercialization, the program was cancelled in the late 1990s due to tightening research budgets at USDOT. Overall funding for the program was in the range of $90 million. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars)

7 years later there was the first DARPA Grand Challenge, where no cars completed successfully. There's a great episode of startup podcast with interviews of the original competitors: https://www.gimletmedia.com/startup/grand-challenge-season-6....

It's interesting to wonder whether and how much farther we'd be with self driving cars and computer vision in general if the government had continued to put its resources behind this project.

With even minimal cooperation from the road, self-driving is far easier. Volvo wanted to drive magnetized nails into the pavement for better navigation in heavy snow.

Looking at it, CMU was involved (as well as Cal Berkeley), among academia, but required embedded transponders. This system is still very viable given that it would be cost effective on freeways where most of the miles are driven. It could have been a great transitional technology but DARPA went and distracted everyone with the great challenge and everyone wanted full autonomous navigation in unpredictable terrain...