important milestones at all these major stages of development, and unless you can fling this book across the room in time, I’m going to share a lot of these with you right now. In chronological order. So get ready.
The beginning of self-driving vehicle design goes back much further than I think most people would expect; in fact, it goes back further than the automobile itself.
Even if we take 1672 as a starting point for the automobile, when Ferdinand Verbiest made a small (think around two feet long), steam-powered vehicle to amuse the Kangxi Emperor of China, the first self-propelled machine with some crude semblance of autonomy was even earlier. And not just a little earlier; we’re talking two centuries earlier.
1478: da Vinci’s Cart
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the person responsible for this incredibly early technological wonder is Leonardo da Vinci, a man so far ahead of his time that he routinely had breakfast for dinner. Remember, this is the guy who came up with tanks, helicopters, parachutes, machine guns, scuba gear, and more, all in his spare time when he wasn’t painting masterpieces.
It’s actually best not to think about his accomplishments too much, because by comparison you’ll just feel like a big steaming pile of inadequacy in a funny hat. So let’s talk specifically about what da Vinci made. It’s usually just called the “self-propelled cart.”
The self-propelled cart was arguably the first robot as well, which supports my notion that self-driving vehicles are really just robots we’ll be able to ride in. This one though was never intended to carry passengers; it appears to have been intended to be about five and a half feet long by five feet wide by about three feet tall. It was powered by clockwork, which means it was powered by energy stored in springs, and the source of that energy was most likely human muscle. Since it was storing the energy and releasing it on demand, I think that makes it different than a human-powered vehicle like a bicycle; after all, gasoline, if you think about it, is essentially an energy storage system for decomposed dinosaurs and time, but we don’t consider cars to be dinosaur-powered.
Propulsion was provided by a pair of coil springs housed in drums, and the power from those springs, which diminished as they wound out, was kept steady by the use of a balance wheel, the sort used to keep spring-wound clocks running at a consistent rate. These springs could give the cart an effective range of about 130 feet of travel.
In addition to propelling itself, the cart had a mechanism by which it could be made to turn at preset points on its journey, by placing wooden blocks at locations between gears (some sources describe placing pegs into holes). It seems that only right turns were permitted, but even with that limitation the end result is impressive: this was a programmable machine, capable of executing a stored set of instructions for a very short journey. That, at least in a very simple sense, is an autonomous vehicle.
Da Vinci never actually produced his cart, but a replica based on his original drawings was built in 2004 by Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence.2
1830s–1840s: Railroads
There was a pretty significant gap between when da Vinci conceived the cart and when it was produced, which isn’t really shocking, since da Vinci’s cart was never actually built and, even if it had been, as a fifteenth century Big Trak, it likely wouldn’t have had much practical use. This, however, isn’t to say that technological development in the automotive arenas wasn’t moving ahead; it was, and pretty significantly.
The advent of steam power was, of course, hugely significant in the development of the automobile. Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot had built the first full-size, working automobile in 1769, but since it was incredibly cumbersome and slow, it was doomed to wreck pretty quickly. Developments soon after led Cugnot to create increasingly practical steam-powered automobiles, with purpose-built cars like Trevithick’s London Steam Carriage of 1801. He later made others to meet the eventual boom in steam omnibuses in England in the 1830s.
But with the boom came difficulties with powerful horse lobbies that were not willing to lose business to some filthy mechanical upstarts, and this, coupled with generally poor road conditions, forced the early automobile builders to abandon the shoddy network of roads. Instead they laid a network of ideal pathways for their automobiles to traverse. These pathways were extremely low rolling resistance roads, allowing the crude vehicles to carry vast amounts of cargo and passengers; by building a set path for these automobiles, the need to develop steering systems was effectively eliminated, with the pathway handling the steering and navigation through its direction and shape.
We call these pathways “railroads” or “trains.”
In many ways, we can think of railroads as one of the earliest semiautonomous vehicle systems, and perhaps to this day still the most common and vast network. A train is an automobile, fundamentally—a self-propelled vehicle, just like the car you drive to the Dairy Queen to do your nightly burnouts in.
There are two major differences between a train and a car: scale and automation. A train is huge compared to a car. Trains, as the earliest automobiles produced in real quantities or really used by the general public, compensated for the crude state of the art by requiring fewer complex mechanisms (the locomotives) and maximizing their use by having them pull long trains of passenger and cargo cars. That’s how money was made—locomotives were not going to be the sorts of vehicles sold to every Thomas, Dickomas, or Harryomas in London.
Trains also differ from automobiles, as we understand them today, in that they have one less dimension of operator control than a car. A car’s driver can control the speed of the car via the accelerator and brake, and the direction of travel via the steering system. In trains, the operator can also control the speed via the throttle and brake, but directional control is ceded to the machine; in this case, the railroad itself, and its associated switching hardware.
In this sense a train is semiautonomous; an operator is required to control the speed and decide when to stop, but steering is autonomous. This sort of autonomy does not require any processing or understanding of the world on the part of the vehicle itself; the network the vehicle operates within handles that. A railroad is like a vast machine unto itself, with the ability to control multiple vehicles via increasingly complex switching and related hardware. These systems, in some form, were in place even by the mid-1800s.
Railroads were humanity’s first successful deployment of a semiautonomous vehicle, and it remains a staggering success.
1866: Whitehead Torpedo
It’s not surprising that war provided the impetus to develop the first semiautonomous vehicle capable of reacting to its environment. I guess it’s a little disappointing, but, come on, we know the story; nothing spurs humans on quite as well as figuring out new and exciting ways to blow one another up. I’m not even going to pretend to moralize here, because we all know this is true.
This first vehicle capable of sensing and reacting to its environment wasn’t a land vehicle, and it couldn’t carry people, just cargo, and that cargo was limited to explosives designed to blow up boats. The vehicle I’m talking about is a torpedo. Back when these were first developed, they were even called “automobile torpedoes.”3 The formal name was the Whitehead Torpedo, a name that sounds like some awful skin-care tool sold in the late 1980s on late-night television. While the basic idea was conceived by others, it was English engineer Robert Whitehead who eventually perfected the design and put it into production. Initially, the
