The first autonomous vehicle race was in 2004

I was there. It was awful. The 2005 Grand Challenge was more like NASCAR; all 24 teams who got there (including ours) had something that basically worked. But 2004 was just pathetic. It was covered by the Comedy Channel.

Here's my post-mortem on the 2004 event.[1]

The CMU debacle was amusing. To prevent pre-planning, each team got the route, as a set of GPS waypoints, a few hours before the start. The CMU team's approach was that they'd obtained aerial photographs of the entire region, and had a semitrailer full of people and workstations to manually plan the route just before the event.

DARPA, however, had other plans. The event staff (mostly active-duty US Marines) had moved some obstacles around just before the event, to prevent exactly what CMU was trying. You can see the result in the link below, as the CMU vehicle plowed right into a solid sheet of corrugated steel. CMU was running that thing mostly blind.

[1] http://www.overbot.com/grandchallenge/note45.html

Autonomous vehicle races are at least 25 years older, but of course, the courses where way, way simpler then: http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/the-am....

The linked article at http://cyberneticzoo.com/tag/amazing-micromouse-maze-contest... shows why, sometimes, the dumb solution is better than the smarter one:

"For a mouse to be truly capable of learning a maze and making smart decisions about solving the maze, physical control of the mouse must be both accurate and repeatible. No attempt was made by us to implement our learning algorithms for our micromice until our control software was good enough to accept the learning algorithms."