Numbers, please! 5.9 kg radio for early semi-autonomous vehicles
Autonomous vehicles are slowly becoming a reality. Remotely controlled, semi-autonomous vehicles have existed for over 100 years. A look back.
Currently, 45 Tesla robotaxis are operating in the downtown area of the Texan city of Austin. Most of them have safety attendants on board to intervene if necessary. Waymo's autonomous taxis are also already zipping through several US cities, sometimes under remote control when things get dicey. This "supervised driving" can, in turn, look back on a history of over a hundred years.
The history of supervised driving is 105 years old. In 1921, signals officer Richard E. Vaugh experimented with small vehicles at McCook Field army airfield near Dayton (Ohio) equipped with transmitters and receivers from RCA, which could thus be controlled by radio.
Radio-controlled car causes a stir in 1921
In October of that year, there was a public demonstration on Main Street in Dayton. The picture shows a three-wheeled car, followed by a car from which Vaughan was controlling the vehicle. It stopped correctly before the intersection and honked. The RCA magazine World Wide Wireless raved (PDF, p. 342): "Tanks could be loaded with TNT and driven through no man's land without a driver, timed to explode when they reach enemy lines."
(Image:Â RCA)
Four years later, the peaceful use of the technology caused a stir. In New York, two Chandler sedans, converted by the Houdina Radio Control Company, were parked on Broadway, one driverless with a receiver, the other steered with a transmitter. As the magazine Radio News wrote (PDF, page 592), the demonstration was intended to show how remote controls could solve the problem of long overland journeys by allowing drivers to rest in the remotely controlled car. Steered by inventor Francis P. Houdina, both vehicles drove down Broadway, merged into the flowing traffic, and turned onto Fifth Avenue, where the remotely controlled Chandler collided with another car: photographers were in that vehicle, wanting to document the spectacle.
The reports about the demonstration caused such a stir that circus artist Harry Houdini visited Houdina's office with his secretary. A physical altercation ensued, during which the office was trashed. Whether it was a staged event or a real argument is disputed. Because the Houdina Radio Control Company disappeared without a trace after two more demonstrations in Boston and Indianapolis, leaving many unpaid bills, newspapers suspected a scam like the famous Turk.
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Wireless control for other everyday devices too
In 1928, the self-proclaimed "Radio Wizard" Maurice J. Francill demonstrated three self-driving Ford cars that circled the Cincinnati courthouse, honked, turned off the engine, and started it again. The newspaper Orange County News calculated: "Eight pounds [3.6 kg] of sensitive brain-like radio equipment were used to control the lights, ignition system, horn, and start the engine. Five pounds [2.3 kg] of radio equipment are needed to steer the car."
Francill was apparently less interested in supervised controlled driving and more in demonstrating how electrical devices could be started via radio. Thus, he remotely switched on a washing machine, a streetcar, and, as the highlight of his show, an electric milking machine.
The next stage of development in supervised driving moved away from radio control and relied on communication with conductor tracks under the road surface. Engineers from General Motors were the ones who introduced this idea with expanded highways.
The idea: The vehicles are manually steered onto the highway and essentially put on rails, then the conductor tracks take over control and inter-vehicle distance communication. For the 1939 World's Fair, a Futurama was designed in which such vehicles drove.
After World War II, it wasn't until 1956 that the General Motors Firebird II concept car saw the first practical trials with such a system on the highway. However, with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the plans disappeared into the drawer: only a 121-meter-long section of road near Lincoln (Nebraska) was upgraded and tested by RCA and General Motors engineers with modified Chevrolets.
(Image:Â CC BY-SA 3.0, Karrmann)
The next step in driving with intelligent support from road systems leads us to the United Kingdom, where engineers from the Transport and Road Research Laboratory equipped a test track with magnetic strips. They tested it with a vehicle starting in the UK. 1961. They used a car that could absorb shocks particularly finely to protect the electronics, a Citroën DS 19. The "Goddess" achieved a top speed of 129 km/h during the 10-year test series and was eventually able to maintain distance automatically before being decommissioned and donated to a museum in 1973.
Groundbreaking autonomous driving in the 1990s
Anyone who wants to admire such a vehicle in Germany can visit the Deutsches Museum in Munich, where the "Experimental Vehicle for Autonomous Mobility and Computer Vision Passenger Car" (VAMP) by roboticist Ernst Dickmanns is on display. Based on a modified Mercedes S-Class, the VAMP approached autonomous driving in the 90s but struggled with the limited computing power in mobile operation.
Alexander Mankowsky, a futurist at Mercedes-Benz, judged in an interview with heise online: "In the nineties, Ernst Dickmanns built a self-seeing S-Class as part of the Prometheus project, which could drive autonomously around the Paris ring road. He still had to work with 8088 and 8086 processors and very low-resolution cameras so that the computers could process the image material. The car drove without GPS, without map knowledge. A brilliant concept back then, the pinnacle of development. Today, we have the same thing embedded in GPS positioning, fast computers, and very good map knowledge. That's not hype. That's a different world."
(Image:Â CC BY-SA 3.0, Ernst D. Dickmanns)
To conclude this brief look back at the development of supervised car driving, let's allow a glance at other means of transport. Because then it becomes clear that the idea is even older. In November 1898, the brilliant inventor Nicola Tesla received a US patent for controlling a ship by radio. In 1903, it was Leonardo Torres Quevedo who realized and patented such a control. His system, called Telekino, was eventually demonstrated to the public, with the Spanish king able to control the ship from land. Torres Quevedo had developed his system of remote-controlled electric motors for his unmanned zeppelins, which were built in France under the name Astra-Torres.
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