Barrett's 1954 Guide-O-Matic followed a wire through warehouses and invented the AGV

In the early 1950s, moving trailers and pallet loads around a warehouse still meant a human driving a towing tractor hour after hour on the same route — a repetitive job that bound a worker to the floor and kept the move slow and expensive.

Arthur 'Mac' Barrett of Barrett Electronics solved the steering problem instead of the driver problem: his Guide-O-Matic tracked a signal in a wire mounted through the building, so the tractor pulled its trailers along the route by itself. The first machine was built in 1953, and the company began selling the driverless vehicle in 1954.

The Guide-O-Matic is credited as the world's first automated guided vehicle. From ceiling wires the technology evolved through floor magnets, laser guidance and autonomous robots, but the core insight — let the environment guide the vehicle, not a person — stayed the same.