[andrewstellman]

When I was studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon in the '90s, I played bass in a band, and the guitar player was a grad student at the Robotics Institute working on the autonomous vehicle project, the reason CMU was part of the consortium in the article. NavLab 2 was an Army Humvee with a laser scanner mounted on the front, along with some cameras and a bunch of other sensors, and some powerful-at-the-time computers (Sun SPARCstations, IIRC) in back. It was a pretty impressive sight: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/ahs/images/navlab_1_5_images/n...

It was usually parked in the Field Robotics garage, but if you went out early on a weekend morning, you might catch it driving itself slowly around Schenley Park (which is right next to CMU campus) – without anyone at the wheel, which was really unreal and sci-fi-ish at the time.

I remember one story of a jogger who was surprised to suddenly run across it. The story goes that the he or she screamed and actually fainted. The truck was programmed to stop if it found itself in front of any obstacle, so when the jogger came to, there was the truck looming above.

I have no idea if the story is actually true, but I like it anyway.

[arama471]

For anyone else having trouble loading the image: https://web.archive.org/web/20160920032328/https://www.cs.cm...

That's pretty incredible - they let it run unsupervised? Or did the jogger just faint for a very short time period?

[andrewstellman]

I remember it running autonomously on the little roads in Schenley Park, which were wide just enough for the vehicle but not open to traffic. Unfortunately, I never learned what happened to the jogger.

[iblaine]

I heard the same story about the jogger being hit by the autonomous Humvee at CMU. I ended up going somewhere other than CMU, but the onsite interview process included a tour, and that tour mentioned this jogger being 'hit'.

[sbov]

Probably the reason why the jogger screamed and "fainted".