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So much of America’s transportation-built environment goes back to 1939 and GM’s Futurama display at the NY World’s Fair. Futurama was a model of what a typical city could look like 20 years into the future. Since then, some ideas have been put into practice, but many have not. While the driverless vehicle looked like a great idea in 1939, it took quite a little bit longer.
Trains could be made driverless starting tomorrow. Some Metro trains have operated driverless for the last 40 years already. The problem of driverless trains is fairly easy to solve as humans built and adapted the road specifically to the needs of these vehicles. Trains have a clear path to go from point A to point B. Trains have right-of-way, and controllers make sure no interference with other trains, cars, or pedestrians can happen.
The US is a very car-centric country, where cars have all the advantages. Yet, the situation for driverless automobiles is very different. The real trick for self-driving vehicles is to adapt the vehicle to roads and terrain that wasn’t adapted for their needs. This requires far more computing power or Artificial Intelligence (AI). At least for researchers that power started to become available in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of computers.
The Military Era of Driverless Vehicles
In 1954, President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) after Russia launched Sputnik. It became DARPA in 1972, then ARPA again in 1993 and reverted back to DARPA in 1996, most likely because USPS couldn’t find them anymore (just a guess).
ARPA/DARPA is a fairly independent military research agency that can take partial credit for technologies like computers, computer networks, GPS, voice interfaces and others that have shaped the last 60 years of civilization. Unfortunately what they couldn’t get done were Autonomous or Self-Driving Vehicles, which can be very useful for the military in times of peace and war.
The US military, however, wasn’t the only one interested in driverless vehicles. Other countries also had researchers searching for a solution for people who are apparently too lazy to drive themselves and too cheap to pay a driver.
1971 U.K.’s Road Research Lab
The concepts and demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s were still reliant on the railway principle of transportation. You needed to provide tracks, cables, or certain rails the cars could use to find their way. For example, in 1971, the UK’s Road Research Lab showed off a version of a robot car with an auto-driving system, which would have required special road markings.
1977 Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Lab, Japan
This car is generally regarded as the first truly autonomous, intelligent vehicle as it didn’t require special streets. It had two cameras and could reach a speed of 30 km/h (19 mph).
1994 VaMP – Eureka Prometheus Project,
One of the first successful driverless cars was developed by German Scientist Ernst Dickmanns at the Bundeswehr University of Munich together with Mercedes-Benz. Ernst Dickmanns’ cars only used cameras and ‘dynamic vision’, which was his research specialty. In 1994 the twin cars VaMP and VITA2 drove more than 600 miles in normal traffic at speeds exceeding 80 mph. In 1995 VaMP drove over 1,200 miles from Munich to Copenhagen. Safety drivers were on board and able to interfere in certain cases; the record was 98 miles without human intervention and reaching a self-driving speed of 110 mph (crazy Autobahns).
1995 ALV to NavLab 5
DARPA has worked with the Carnegie Mellon University Navigation Lab (CMU NavLab) since the early 80s on an Autonomous Land driven Vehicle (ALV). This might have been the first time light radar (Lidar) was used.
The main researcher at CMU was William “Red” Whittaker. His robotic skills became famous when his robots roamed the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant after its meltdown. His inventions also climbed volcanoes, mapped abandoned coal mines, survived Antarctica, and inspected the tiles at the underside of the Space Shuttle. By 1995 CMU’s vehicle NavLab5 drove from Pittsburgh to San Diego on a proof-of-concept trip named “No Hands Across America”. The system navigated by itself for 2,797 of the 2,850 miles. The average speed exceeded 60 mph.
Honorable Mention
There was plenty of other research going on around the world. South Korea University had a project in 1995, but funding got cut. Toyota introduced Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) in 1996 – another important piece of technology that made later developments easier. The University of Parma had project ARGO. The Netherlands was working on its first People Movers – vehicles without pedals or a steering wheel. USDOT and the US Army were working on their research projects. Any country with car manufacturing had probably some kind of research going on at the time.
Editor’s Note: The views and opinions expressed in all blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Redwood City Pulse or its staff.
