On 3 June 1998 Argo triumphantly arrived at the University of Ancona, welcomed by the rector and the president of Engineering. In the photo on the site you can also see a Rai operator with the camera. The journey wasn’t over yet, but it was already a triumph. The first Millemiglia driven with an automatic car. Self-driving. In 1998. In Italy. Behind this enterprise, the first of a long series, there is VisLab, a technology startup that started in Parma as a university project in the 90s and then became a spin off, that is an autonomous company, in 1990. The pioneer who before the others had given the potential of autonomous driving, for example on road safety, it is Alberto Broggi. I haven’t felt it for a while, since VisLab was acquired by an American company, Ambarella, in 2015. I had met him on the occasion of another venture, a trip with autonomous driving from Parma to Shanghai, where he the Universal Exposition would be held in 2010 (three months, thirty thousand kilometers, an epic stuff).
The 1998 Millemiglia seems like a no brainer in comparison but it wasn’t. At the time, talking about autonomous driving, or machine learning, neural networks, sensors, robotics, stereoscopic vision, applied to driving was science fiction. Not for Alberto Broggi and his team. And in short, the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Parma, with CNR funds, had begun to develop the first vision algorithms as early as 1989. A first demonstration took place in 1994 at which point the team acquired a vehicle, a Lancia Thema 2000 on petrol, giving it the mythological name of ARGO, equipped it with the necessary devices and began testing everything on the road.
The 1998 Millemiglia was the first real success. Departure from Parma, of course, on June 1st; and then away for six days passing through Piacenza, Turin, Milan, Pavia, Padua, Ferrara, Bologna, Ancona (the third day), breaking latest news, Rome, Florence, Bologna and finally Parma again, after one thousand and eight hundred kilometers with the automatic mode connected to the Internet through TIM, sponsor of the project. It must be said, and even those of VisLab recognize it on the official website, that the company was one of the first in the world but not the first. There had been two similar experiments: one in America, conducted by a Carnegie Mellon group, No Hands Across America; and one from Munich (Germany) to Odensa (Denmark) conducted by a German university.
But the Millemiglia in automatic mode remains a memorable feat: the goal was “to demonstrate that it is possible to automatically drive a vehicle on public roads and in different environmental conditions using only low-cost visual information and commercial hardware”.
They were really ahead of VisLab and continued to stay there. Too bad that in Italy we didn’t notice.
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