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.

Comments

Reacting to input vs being pushed.

[DrYak]

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.

" seems pretty impressive and sophisticated."

[Viol8]

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.