The Goals We’re After Aren’t New

At times we look to try and make sure we are working toward the next big thing in our business lives and our industries only to have the thought of what we’re doing being shot down. Since the next great thing for vehicles is to have autonomous driving vehicles on the road it seems like we’ve been heading in this direction for the past few years, but you might be surprised by when this technology actually showed up. Long before the first computer was installed in a vehicle there were some vehicles that could drive themselves.

If that just blew your mind, you need to check out the videos below and see for yourself. The folks at one of the most prestigious and respected research universities in the country found a way to have vehicles that could drive themselves back in the early and mid-1980s. The place these vehicles were developed was at Carnegie Mellon University where many of the technologies we love today are built for us to see what they have to offer. What this school did was extremely amazing, especially when you consider the complete lack of advanced computerization that was available at the time.

Considering the amount of digital technology that’s available today for vehicles to become autonomous and that Carnegie Mellon had this technology on the road and on the trails in 1986, its surprising that we haven’t already started to have whole fleets of self-driving cars on the road. The first model that this university created was the Terregator which was short of Terrestrial Navigator which used lasers, sonar and video cameras to be able to navigate on the trails. This was a slow moving machine, but it was one that could navigate on its own.

Next they created the NavLab 1, which used a Chevrolet conversion van to create a vehicle that could drive on the road at speeds up to 20 mph. Yes, this is also slow, but it could be overridden if needed and was able to carry a team where they needed to go. While companies work to figure out how to create the self-driving cars that will be right for us, it seems the technology and idea aren’t new to us; they are just new to us in a larger capacity than they’ve ever been before now.

Check out this video, as well as this one and be amazed by what was actually in operation thirty years ago. This may make you wonder what’s taking so long and most of that may be the fact that the automotive industry just began to work on making vehicles self-driving while a research institute can do some amazing things well ahead of the industry catching up. Maybe some brands should turn to Carnegie Mellon and see if they can pick their brains to build us the right self-driving cars.