The DARPA grand challenge was certainly a pivotal event, but I wouldn't say it jump-started the industry. The two biggest teams in the second race, from CMU and Stanford, were both spinoffs of the Field Robotics Center at CMU, which had been doing this for a long time:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tjochem/nhaa/Journal.html http://www.pbs.org/saf/transcripts/transcript705.htm

Disclosure: I was a grad student at CMU at the time, in the building, and saw a lot of this up close.