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Meet the World's First Self-Driving Car From 1968
Qbertino writes: The German Web industry magazine T3N (think of it as the German TechCrunch) has an article about a test circuit and a test vehicle -- a modified Mercedes Benz limousine of the time -- that was set up by the German tire manufacturer Continental in order to test tires in a precisely reproducible set of tests. Hence the self-driving mechanism provided by a wire in the test track to send and receive signals from the car and to record data on the test runs on magnetic tape and other high-tech stuff from the time. Here's a short video, erm, film clip showing the setup in action -- driverless seat included. Today's artificial intelligence is nowhere to be seen of course, but the entire setup itself seems pretty impressive and sophisticated.
Posting all German articles to Slashdot these days? Really?
I find it hard to claim the car was "self driving" when it was directed by a wire in the test track.
It was no more self-driving than someone who reads a horoscope every day and does what it says.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Running a train on a drugged girl?
What the fuck is wrong with Republicans???
You perverts are really trying to put a RAPIST on the supreme court?
The video was posted nearly two years ago.
You talk a big game, but I'll bet the blood on your baseball bat came from your rectum, asshole.
I'm here to defend my country against the traitor-rapists who collude with Russia to undermine our values, and your gay ass whining isn't going to stop me.
Maybe if you spent less time cupping Trump's balls while his supreme court nominee rapes your daughter you wouldn't be such a fucking treason-cuck.
You talk a big game, but I'll bet the blood on your baseball bat came from your own rectum, asshole.
I'm here to defend my country against the traitor-rapists who collude with Russia to undermine our values, and your gay ass whining isn't going to stop me.
Maybe if you spent less time cupping Trump's balls while his supreme court nominee rapes your daughter you wouldn't be such a fucking treason-cuck.
Everyone knows you leave them in a car in a river after so they can't testify against you later. Republicans are so stupid!
Except that republicans are such prodigious rapists that they would have to drown dozens of women.
And that's not even counting the gang rapes that republican treason-cucks participate in or implicitly support.
You republican rapist shit-stains even voted overwhelmingly for a child molester for Alabama's Senate seat. No surprise that thanks to the retarded, rapey, gene pool in Alabama that's where the child rape is the strongest and mos widely supported.
Yes, you will do anything for Moscow Donald and mother Russia, eh comrade treason-cuck.
Too bad your gene pool is weak from cousin-fucking and child rape. You will accidentally shoot your kids and yourself while masturbating your gun long before you get near a patriotic American like me.
Herbie the Love Bug was a fictional character.
I already got a blood stained condom I got fucking your underage menstruating daughter, and I posted that on the door to her high school.
Oh wait, I'm not a republican rapist like your hero Moscow Donald, so I only have consensual sex with adult females.
So if you want to find me, you'll have to take your dick out of your sister and go to 666 Fifth Avenue, NY NY.
25th floor, between Silent Jared's treason-office and the room where Moscow Donald vaginally penetrates his daughter with his tiny fingers and limp, Toad from Mario Kart shaped penis.
Following a wire is not "driving itself", it's basically following commands input externally by humans.
If I stand outside the car and use a string to turn the steering wheel, is it "driving itself"?
In case you were seriously wondering the answer is NO.
Also I have bad news for you, those puppets you really loved at that one show are not in fact sentient cloth creatures.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There was another car which drove on the german highway, speeds up to 110mph and for about 1200miles. No wires, no external help.
Used analog video camera and the system was very basic, but it all started decades ago
instead of the blinkers. I can sleep better now.
The program is really simple. Here it is:-
$ cat Hamlet.txt
A lot of claimed AI is not much more than that, Eliza being the classic example. That is the problem with AI, very hard to define.
Using two steel or wooden tracks to guide a self propelled engine is just as applicable so it was James Watt in the late 1700s.
Using rails to guide a vehicle is just using a physical device to push the engine and keep it on track. The self propelled engine is only moving forward and doing nothing more.
In both modern and this old "self-driving" cars, the cars isn't only moving forward, there's also electronics that does some steering in order to keep following a given path. The subtle difference is in the sensor technology used.
The old car, uses a special purpose guide (a wire) that is easy for the onboard system to detect, and determine how to steer in order to stay on track.
Nowadays, thanks to Moore's law and other miniaturization tech, cars like Tesla, Mercedes, Volvo, etc. use the same visual guide that was laid out for humans (painted lanes marking on the ground) to detect and determine how to streer in order to stay in the lane.
The later has the advantage on using the exact same guide that is already laid out everywhere.
The former sadly has to rely on a custom solution, so it can't scale beyond a test track, and would never be useful to introduce self-driving in a city. But it is already useful : recording what parameters (steering/speed) was necessary to stay on track gives you an exact idea of what you're designing your tires for (having good grip and how it impacts the driving).
It's a distant cousin of the "small electronic cars that follows where you point your light at" gadget that was popular when we were kids. Again, extremely crude sensors (because that's the max you can pack inside your gadget back in the 80s), that give a target for the gadget to track and follow. But it's the device that (autonomously) steers toward the target.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Note to all millenials - we sent men to the moon only a year after this so yes, things could be quite sophisticated back then. Also London had self driving automatic trains on the Underground in 1967.
The technological revolution didn't start with the iPhone or Facebook. HTH.
Germany had self driving V2s in 1944.
That's essentially a life-size Scalextrix. The "intelligence" is entirely contained in the track embedded in the road deck.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Outside Lincoln, Nebraska in 1957 says IEEE:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/selfdriving-cars-were-just-around-the-cornerin-1960
You know there is really no difference between the way this works and modern lane-keeping systems right?
That is not self driving either.
But lets pretend it is - there is a vast difference, because in the case of the lines it's using input meant for humans to control where the car steers, as opposed to using a specific car-road integration that dumbly follows a wire. The difference is intelligence and scope.
P.S. I do not have a Tesla. But I have dabbled in writing software for self driving cars so I pretty obviously know more about how this all works than you do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I remember as a kid reading a book published around 1962 that self driving cars would be common by the mid 70's using guides in the road to follow and keep them in their lanes. I was reading it in the early 80's so that was rather amusing, as the technology had been long abandoned.
I wonder if this is where William Gibson got the idea for the self-driving Mercedes Benz limo in his novel "Count Zero"?
This car was preceded by the General Motors Firebird series, in the 1950s. See . It included the ability to follow a cable embedded in the road: .