ent out radio impulses which were caught by the transmitting antennae. Achen Motor, a distributor of cars in Milwaukee and surrounding territory, used Francis' invention under the name "Phantom Auto" and demonstrated it in December 1926 at the streets of Milwaukee.[1] It was demonstrated again in June 1932 at the streets of Fredericksburg as a feature attraction of Bigger Bargain Day in which most of the merchants of the city were participating.[23]
1930s[edit]
An early representation of an automated guided car was Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama exhibit sponsored by General Motors at the 1939 World's Fair, which depicted radio-controlled electric cars that were propelled via electromagnetic fields provided by circuits embedded in the roadway.[24]
Bel Geddes later outlined his vision in his book, Magic Motorways (1940), promoting advances in highway design and transportation, foreshadowing the Interstate Highway System, and arguing that humans should be removed from the process of driving. Bel Geddes forecasted these advances to be a reality in 1960. This M-1 vehicle detector was used at the first automatic driving demonstration in the United States, which took place in Lincoln in 1957. Inspired by the efforts, the electric utility company, Central Power and Light Company, launched an advertorial that was posted on many leading newspapers throughout 1956 and 1957 and predicted automated driving: ELECTRICITY MAY BE THE DRIVER. One day your car may speed along an electric super-highway, its speed and steering automatically controlled by electronic devices embedded in the road. Highways will be made safe – by electricity! No traffic jams ... no collisions ... no driver fatigue[25]
General Motors' Firebird III on display at the Century 21 Exposition, Seattle, 1962. The RRL's modified 1960 Citroen DS19 to be automatically controlled at the Science Museum, London. Prince Akahito of Japan viewing the Aeromobile 200-2 at the Tokyo International Trade Fair in 1962.
1950s[edit]
In 1953, RCA Labs successfully built a miniature car that was guided and controlled by wires that were laid in a pattern on a laboratory floor. The system sparked the imagination of Leland M. Hancock, traffic engineer in the Nebraska Department of Roads, and of his director, L. The decision was made to experiment with the system in actual highway installations. In 1958, a full size system was successfully demonstrated by RCA Labs and the State of Nebraska on a 400-foot strip of public highway just outside Lincoln, Neb. A series of experimental detector circuits buried in the pavement were a series of lights along the edge of the road. The detector circuits were able to send impulses to guide the car and determine the presence and velocity of any metallic vehicle on its surface. It was developed in collaboration with General Motors, who paired two standard models with equipment consisting of special radio receivers and audible and visual warning devices that were able to simulate automatic steering, accelerating and brake control. It was further demonstrated on 5 June 1960, at RCA Lab's headquarter in Princeton, New Jersey, where reporters were allowed to "drive" on the cars. Commercialization of the system was expected to happen by 1975.[26][27]
Also during the 1950s throughout the 1960s, General Motors showcased the Firebirds, a series of experimental cars that were described to have an "electronic guide system [that] can rush it over an automatic highway while the driver relaxes".
1960s[edit]
In 1960, Ohio State University's Communication and Control Systems Laboratory launched a project to develop driverless cars which were activated by electronic devices imbedded in the roadway. Head of the project, Dr. Robert L. Cosgriff, claimed in 1966 that the system could be ready for installation on a public road in 15 years.[28]
In the early 1960s, the Bureau of Public Roads considered the construction of an experimental electronically controlled highway. Four states - Ohio, Massachusetts, New York and California - were bidding for the construction.[29] In August 1961, Popular Science reported on the Aeromobile 35B, an air-cushion vehicle (ACV) that was invented by William Bertelsen and was envisioned to revolutionise the transportation system, with personal self-driving hovering cars that could speed up to 1,500MPH. During the 1960s, the United Kingdom's Transport and Road Research Laboratory tested a driverless Citroen DS that interacted with magnetic cables that were embedded in the road. It went through a test track at 80 miles per hour (130 km/h) without deviation of speed or direction in any weather conditions, and in a far more effective way than by human control. Research continued in the '70s with cruise control devices activated by signals in the cabling beneath the tracks. According to cost benefit analyses that were made, adoption of system on the British motorways would been repaid by end of the century, increase the road capacity by at least 50% and prevent around 40% of the accidents. Funding for these experiments was withdrawn by the mid-1970s.[30][31][32]
Also during the 1960s and the 1970s, Bendix Corporation developed and tested driverless cars that were powered and controlled by buried cables, with wayside communicators relaying computer messages. Stanford demonstrated its Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Cart, a small wheeled robot that once accidentally navigated onto a nearby road.
1980s[edit]
In the 1980s, a vision-guided Mercedes-Benz robotic van, designed by Ernst Dickmanns and his team at the Bundeswehr University Munich in Munich, Germany, achieved a speed of 39 miles per hour (63 km/h) on streets without traffic.[5] Subsequently, EUREKA conducted the €749 million Prometheus Project on autonomous vehicles from 1987 to 1995. In the same decade, the DARPA-funded Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV) project in the United States made use of new technologies developed by the University of Maryland, Carnegie Mellon University, the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan, Martin Marietta and SRI International. The ALV project achieved the first road-following demonstration that used lidar, computer vision and autonomous robotic control to direct a robotic vehicle at speeds of up to 19 miles per hour (31 km/h). In 1987, HRL Laboratories (formerly Hughes Research Labs) demonstrated the first off-road map and sensor-based autonomous navigation on the ALV. The vehicle traveled over 2,000 feet (610 m) at 1.9 miles per hour (3.1 km/h) on complex terrain with steep slopes, ravines, large rocks, and vegetation. By 1989, Carnegie Mellon University had pioneered the use of neural networks to steer and otherwise control autonomous vehicles,[33] forming the basis of contemporary control strategies.
1990s[edit]
In 1991, the United States Congress passed the ISTEA Transportation Authorization bill, which instructed USDOT to "demonstrate an automated vehicle and highway system by 1997." The Federal Highway Administration took on this task, first with a series of Precursor Systems Analsyes and then by establishing the National Automated Highway System Consortium (NAHSC). This cost-shared project was led by FHWA and General Motors, with Caltrans, Delco, Parsons Brinkerhoff, Bechtel, UC-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Lockheed Martin as additional partners. Extensive systems engineering work and research culminated in Demo '97 on I-15 in San Diego, California, in which about 20 automated vehicles, including cars, buses, and trucks, were demonstrated to thousands of onlookers, attracting extensive media coverage. The demonstrations involved close-headway platooning intended to operate in segregated traffic, as well as "free agent" vehicles intended to operate in mixed traffic. Other carmakers were invited to demonstrate their systems, such that Toyota and Honda also participated. While the subsequent aim was to produce a system design to aid commercialization, the program was cancelled in the late 1990s due to tightening research budgets at USDOT. Overall funding for the program was in the range of $90 million.[34]
In 1994, the twin robot vehicles VaMP and Vita-2 of Daimler-Benz and Ernst Dickmanns of UniBwM drove more than 620 miles (1,000 km) on a Paris three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 81 miles per hour (130 km/h), albeit semi-autonomously with human interventions. They demonstrated autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, and lane changes with autonomous passing of other cars.[citation needed] That same year, Lucas Industries developed parts for a semi-autonomous car in a project that was funded by Jaguar Cars, Lucas, and the UK Department of Trade and Industry.[35]
In 1995, Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab project completed a 3,100 miles (5,000 km) cross-country journey, of which 98.2% was autonomously controlled, dubbed "No Hands Across America".[36] This car, however, was semi-autonomous by nature: it used neural networks to control the steering wheel, but throttle and brakes were human-controlled, chiefly for safety reasons. Also in 1995, Dickmanns' re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz undertook a 990 miles (1,590 km) journey from Munich in Bavaria, Germany to Copenhagen, Denmark and back, using saccadic computer vision and transputers to react in real time.
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