Carnegie Mellon's 1986 Self-Driving Van Was Adorable

Computer scientists have been at the self-driving vehicle problem for longer than you might think. Early research into the automated logic required for autonomous cars was published in the mid-70s, while the first fully robotic van came around in the early-80s courtesy of Ernst Dickmanns and his team at Bundeswehr University Munich. Efforts at Carnegie Mellon, meanwhile, were pushing the technology on the other side of that Atlantic. Then came NavLab, in 1986. Yeah, it's pretty quaint, but machine vision algorithms, in particular, were still young.