Back To The Source - AIMing for Automated Vehicles

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Paul Grayson

Back To The Source
January 9, 2008

[Scanned image from AIM Technical Library]

BACK TO THE SOURCE
After working a long time with the gritty details of driverless and automatic guided vehicles it is time to step back and take a look at where it all came from. Engineers/designers work in that grey area between ideas and tangible product that most people never get to see.  Outsiders consider designs "fiction" until they can be shown a working version or until the product goes into production.  A well told fiction story that paints a picture in the mind of the engineer of something she/he would like to build is a compelling force for change.

ROBOTICS
R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the 1921 science fiction play by Karel Capek introduced the term Robot, but it was not until March 1942 that the word Robotics appeared in print - in a story by Isaac Asimov in Astounding Science Fiction magazine.  Asimov has made a life's work out of writing stories about robots and considering all the possibilities of what they might get themselves into, the social implications, how they might work, what use they might be put to, etc.

Driverless cars, their operation, and their social implications were considered by Asimov in a short story called "Sally". It was first published in 1953, one year before our GMC M-215 US Army truck, which we are modifying from manual to automatic operation, was built.

      "The thought makes me feel old. I can remember when there wasn't an automobile in the world with brains enough to find its own way home. I chauffeured dead lumps of machines that needed a man's hand at their controls every minute. Every year machines like that used to kill tens of thousands of people.
     The automatics fixed that. A positronic brain can react much faster than a human one, of course, and it paid people to keep hands off the controls. You got in, punched your destination, and let it go on its own way.
     We take it for granted now, but I remember when the first laws came out forcing the old machines off the highways and limited travel to automatics. Lord, what a fuss. They called it everything from communism to fascism, but it emptied the highways and stopped the killing, and still more people get around more easily the new way."
                      -- p100 - Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov, c1986 Ace Books, $0.01 used Amazon.com

Sprinkled throughout the story are hints at how these - then commonplace - machines work.
Passenger size cars are called Automatic now as opposed to their earlier form, Manual.
They are also available in a larger, truck or bus like size called Automatobus.
They are capable of gesture recognition.
The powerplant is integrated with the controls and is labeled as a Hennis-Carleton positronic motor.
The Mat-O-Mot produced in the 2015 model years was one of the original automatics.
The vehicle consists of two parts Chassis which makes up 5% of the vehicle cost and the Positoronic Motor, 95% of the vehicle cost. The positronic motor is a combination of powerplant and controls, basically everything that is not vehicle body (chassis).
Of course, machines this complex have their own personalities, as did the vehicles in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge Race.

Rough Notes:

Armat Chassis [5% of cost] (bodies)
Sally - 2045 model year convertible
[Knock sensor]
cars with personalities
cars put out to pasture on the Farm
2015 model year Mat-O-Mot, one of the original automatics.
automatics
"transportation for blind war veterans, paraplegics and heads of state"
omnibus-automatics
"it works by itself"
"It scans the road, reacts properly to obstacles, humans and other cars, and remembers routes to travel." p101
"Farm for Retired Automobiles"
"They are hard-working and affectionate."
"fifty thousand minimum per automatic, original investment"
"positronic-motored cars"
"hand-driven ones" [manual]
"dean of the Farm"
dithering
motor|chassis
"There's a big market for private automatics if they could only be made cheaply enough."
[semi-automatic demilitarized version?]
"And 95% of the cost is the motor" [motor/controls|chassis]
"The motors and bodies are not two separate items. They're a single unit."
[adaptive] "Those motors are used to their own bodies. They wouldn't be happy in another car."
locking Manual|Automatic switch.
"not meant to be turned off"
The two parts of the vehicle are motor and chassis.

One of the streets from the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, photo by AIM Team members Linda and Tom Graham.

GO ROBOTS !