History of development of map-based automotive navigation system ‘honda electro gyrocator’

Abstract

This article overviews the history of development of world's first map-based automotive navigation system `Honda Electro Gyrocator'. Even prior to the advent of GPS, Honda devised a sophisticated mechanism to display the traveled course of a moving vehicle on CRT, referring to the idea inspired by inertial navigation systems so far developed for airplanes, and then constructed a man-machine processing scheme to overlay one of transparent road-map sheets on the traveled course displayed on CRT, so that the driver could view the present location over the transparent road-map sheet. This scheme was finally evolved into the map-based navigation system `Honda Electric Gyrocator', which was released for the first time in 1981.