It's what was meant by autonomous at the time, and isn't terribly far removed from what most autonomous drones are doing today. Today they might be using machi

It's what was meant by autonomous at the time, and isn't terribly far removed from what most autonomous drones are doing today. Today they might be using machine vision to identify targets, in the 70s and 80s they could do signal analysis to match sonar or radar signals to a database of signatures from known baddies.