In this article, I want to share some news from Ford about its new AI and autonomous vehicle division, named Latitude AI. But, to really understand why this is an important move, we need to first look at the history of autonomous vehicles.It seems like not too long ago that the idea of a car that drives itself at all was confined to science fiction, with one of the more popular examples being KITT from.
In 1953, RCA Labs successfully created a system with a miniature car guided and controlled by wires laid in a pattern on a laboratory floor. The system inspired Leland M. Hancock, traffic engineer in the Nebraska Department of Roads, and his director, L. N. Ress, state engineer, to experiment with the system in highway installations.
In 1987, Ernst Dickmanns and his team at the Bundeswehr University Munich in Munich, Germany, achieved a milestone by designing a vision-guided Mercedes-Benz robotic van that could reach speeds of 59.6 miles per hour on streets without traffic. The success of this project sparked the €749,000,000 EUREKA Prometheus Project, which ran from 1987 to 1995 and focused on researching autonomous vehicles.
The success of these events eventually led to autonomous vehicle technology appearing in everyday life, such as self-driving cars, buses, delivery drones, and more. Many of the top researchers in the field either participated in the event themselves or learned from those who did.The big common takeaway from all this is that something as complex as a self-driving car doesn’t seem to happen through the traditional development practices of automakers.