Vehicular Navigation History: Old Ideas Made Better with New Technology

Robert L. French

Abstract:	Land vehicle navigation has a surprisingly long history, with some of its key concepts applied as early as the first cen- tury BC. The world's first vehicular navigation system was the south-pointing chariot, an automatic direction keeping system developed by the Chinese around 200-300 AD, almost 1000 years before the magnetic compass. Automatic mechani- cal route guides began appearing around 1910 to aid drivers of early automobiles. The first vehicular navigation system to incorporate electronics was the Vehicular Odograph of World War II which mechanically integrated the output of an odometer with that of a photoelectrically read compass. The Electronic Route Guidance System (ERGS), which was the sub- ject of research and limited subsystem testing in the late 196Os, established concepts for proximity-beacon supported dynamic route guidance. Satellite positioning, forms of which are beginning to be included in automobile navigation systems, also originated in the 1960s. Map matching, an artificial-intelligence process invented in 1970 for using digital road maps to remove errors in position, is the most recent addition to the underlying technologies now commonly incorporated in automobile navigation systems.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1991) June 10 - 12, 1991 Williamsburg Hilton and National Conference Center Williamsburg, VA
Pages:	239 - 249
Cite this article:	French, Robert L., "Vehicular Navigation History: Old Ideas Made Better with New Technology," Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1991), Williamsburg, VA, June 1991, pp. 239-249.
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