Large corporations and academic organizations are engaged in a fierce competition to develop commercially available autonomous vehicles. They have the power to drastically change our perception of and behavior around transportation. But how did we arrive at this cutting-edge invention that appeared unthinkable only a short while ago?
The year 1500s
We understand your thought process: driverless vehicles in the 1500s? Yes, exactly! Surprisingly, though, the original concept for an autonomous vehicle was conceived decades before the first automobile. Leonardo da Vinci invented a cart that could move on its own without needing to be pushed or dragged in the 1500s. Power was given by highly tensioned springs, and the steering was pre-assigned to allow the cart to travel along a predefined course. This apparatus is occasionally denoted as the initial robot in history.
The year 1900s
Francis Houdina, an inventor, drove a radio-controlled automobile around Manhattan streets in 1925 without anybody else being in the driver’s seat. The radio had the ability to shift gears, blow the horn, and start the engine. This vehicle provided a preview of autonomous vehicles to come, but it was swiftly taken out of service after the driver lost control twice while driving and collided with another automobile. The industry did not give up on remote-controlled cars in spite of this early setback.
General Motors unveiled the first self-driving car prototype at the World’s Fair in 1939. It was an electric car that ran on magnetized metal spikes buried in the pavement and was propelled by radio-controlled electromagnetic fields. In 1958, this model became a reality. The vehicle was equipped with sensors that were able to measure the current passing via a wire buried in the pavement. The steering wheel could be turned left or right by adjusting the current.
In 1961, while the space competition was at its height, scientists started thinking about how to land cars on the moon. James Adams as a result designed the Stanford Cart, which is equipped with cameras and is designed to recognize and follow a line on the ground on its own. Cameras, a crucial component of modern autonomous vehicles, were originally used in these vehicles.
The Japanese built on this concept in 1977 when they developed a camera system that sent data to a computer so it could process road image data. As a result, the first autonomous passenger car in history—which could travel up to 20 miles per hour—was tested.
In order to create self-driving cars, Carnegie Mellon University integrated neural networks into image processing and steering controls by 1990. NavLab 5, the self-driving car developed by Carnegie Mellon researchers, made a 2,797-mile trip from Pittsburgh to San Diego in 1995. The car was driverless except for the fact that they had control over the brakes and speed.
The Years 2000–Today
The autonomous car market was booming by the early 2000s. To accelerate the development of autonomous vehicles, the U.S. Department of Defense’s research arm, DARPA, sponsored a number of competitions. A competition to test vehicles’ ability to independently traverse 150 miles of desert route was organized in 2004. No vehicle finished the course. Four automobiles finished the 60-mile urban simulation that was the challenge in 2007.
Major automakers including Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW as well as ride-sharing services like Uber started experimenting with self-driving technology by the middle of the 2010s. But as it turned out, achieving actual autonomy was harder than anticipated, and many of these businesses eventually shut down. Notably, Uber declared in 2020 that they were abandoning their plans to test self-driving cars due to concerns about safety, legal issues, and financial losses.
As of 2021, Tesla is the closest business to release driverless vehicles on the market with their Full Self-Driving package, which allows for hands-free driving on freeways and highways. Still, there is no way to quantify that the automobiles are autonomous. In reality, Tesla was advised to stop using this word by the German government.
Not even among these ground-breaking inventions are completely autonomous cars offered for sale on the market. On the other hand, hundreds of autonomous cars are already in use in significant sectors like mining. In under 7 years of operation as of May 2021, Caterpillar’s autonomous trucks had successfully moved over 3 billion tonnes of material. There is some promise for overcoming the challenges posed by autonomous automobiles due to their performance in the mining sector.