Although the program failed to meet its goal of high-level machine intelligence, it did meet some of its specific technical objectives, for example those of autonomous land navigation. The Autonomous Land Vehicle program and its sister
Navlab project at Carnegie Mellon University, in particular, laid the scientific and technical foundation for many of the driverless vehicle programs that came after it, such as the Demo II and III programs (ALV being Demo I), Perceptor, and the
DARPA Grand Challenge. The use of video cameras plus laser scanners and inertial navigation units pioneered by the SCI ALV program form the basis of almost all commercial
driverless car developments today. It also helped to advance the state of the art of computer hardware to a considerable degree. On the software side, the initiative funded development of the
Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool (DART), a program that handled
logistics using
artificial intelligence techniques. This was a huge success, saving the Department of Defense billions during
Desert Storm. Introduced in 1991, DART had by 1995 offset the monetary equivalent of all funds
DARPA had channeled into AI research for the previous 30 years combined. ==See also==