DARPA Challenge

So how do vehicles make the jump from simply cruising the freeway and parallel parking to fully autonomy?

In 2004, 2005, and again in 2007, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) posed an open challenge to researchers to solve this problem. The 2007 event even included an urban driving challenge where vehicles attempted to navigate residential areas, a deceptively complex task that we humans often take for granted.