This radio control airplane is carrying a scale model of X-33 and is taking part in NASA research.

Radio control (sometimes abbreviated R/C) is the use of radio signals to remotely control a device. The term is used frequently to refer to the control of model cars, boats, airplanes, and helicopters from a hand-held radio transmitter. Industrial, military, and scientific research organizations make use of radio-controlled vehicles as well. Download high resolution version (1800x1232, 1558 KB) NASA photo ID: EC98-44814-8 A radio controlled model aircraft, acting as a miniature mothership, carries aloft a model of the X-33. ... Download high resolution version (1800x1232, 1558 KB) NASA photo ID: EC98-44814-8 A radio controlled model aircraft, acting as a miniature mothership, carries aloft a model of the X-33. ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... The X-33 was a technology demonstrator for NASAs next-generation of space launch vehicle. ... The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an agency of the United States government, responsible for the nations public space program. ...

History

In 1898 at an exhibition at Madison Square Garden Nikola Tesla demonstrated a small boat which could apparently obey commands from the audience but was in fact controlled by Tesla interpreting the verbal requests and sending appropriate frequencies to tuned circuits in the boat. He was granted a US patent on this invention on November 8th, 1898.[1] Year 1898 (MDCCCXCVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Monday of the 12-day-slower Julian calendar). ... Madison Square Garden, often abbreviated as MSG, known colloquially simply as The Garden, has been the name of four arenas in New York City, United States. ... Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)[1] was a world-renowned Serbian inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer. ... Nikola Tesla with his invention, a wireless lightbulb powered by the electric field surrounding it. ...

In 1904, Bat, a Windermere steam launch, was controlled using experimental radio control by its inventor, Jack Kitchen. 1904 (MCMIV) was a leap year starting on a Friday (see link for calendar). ... Windermere or close variations is a name used in a number of places, including: // Bodies of water Windermere, lake, in the Lake District, county of Cumbria, the largest lake in England See also Lake Windermere Windermere Basin, bay, Ontario, Canada (43°1556N 79°4647W) Towns and...

In 1909 the French inventor Gabet demonstrated what he called his "Torpille Radio-Automatique", a radio controlled torpedo.[2] Year 1909 (MCMIX) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Thursday of the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ...

In 1917, Archibald Low as head of the RFC Experimental Works, was the first person to use radio control successfully on an aircraft. Professor Archibald Montgomery Low Professor Archibald Montgomery Low (born 1888 Purley, London, died September 1956) was an English engineer, research physicist and inventor, he was also the author of more than 40 books. ... The Royal Flying Corps (RFC) was the over-land air arm of the British military during most of World War I. // Formed by Royal Warrant on 13 May 1912, the RFC superseded the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers. ...

In the 1920s, various radio-controlled ships were used for naval artillery target practice.

The Soviet Red Army used remotely controlled teletanks during 1930s in the Winter War against Finland and in the early stages of World War II. A teletank is controlled by radio from a control tank at a distance of 500–1,500 meters, the two constituting a telemechanical group. Teletanks were used by the Soviet Red Army in the Winter War and fielded at least two teletank battalions at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. There were also remotely controlled cutters and experimental remotely controlled planes in the Red Army. For other organizations known as the Red Army, see Red Army (disambiguation). ... TT-26 teletank A teletank is a remotely controlled unmanned tank used in combat to minimize human casualties. ... Face The 1930s (years from 1930–1939) were described as an abrupt shift to more radical and conservative lifestyles, as countries were struggling to find a solution to the Great Depression, also known in Europe as the World Depression. ... Combatants Finland Soviet Union Commanders Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim Kliment Voroshilov, later Semyon Timoshenko Strength 250,000 men 30 tanks 130 aircraft[1][2] 1,000,000 men 3,000 tanks 3,800 aircraft[3][4] Casualties 26,662 dead 39,886 wounded 1,000 captured[5] 126,875 dead... Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000... For other organizations known as the Red Army, see Red Army (disambiguation). ... Combatants Finland Soviet Union Commanders Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim Kliment Voroshilov, later Semyon Timoshenko Strength 250,000 men 30 tanks 130 aircraft[1][2] 1,000,000 men 3,000 tanks 3,800 aircraft[3][4] Casualties 26,662 dead 39,886 wounded 1,000 captured[5] 126,875 dead... The Eastern Front1 was the theatre of combat between Nazi Germany and its allies against the Soviet Union during World War II. It was somewhat separate from the other theatres of the war, not only geographically, but also for its scale and ferocity. ...

In the 1930s Britain developed the radio controlled Queen Bee gunnery target aircraft, a remotely controlled unmanned Tiger Moth aircraft for a fleet's guns to practice shooting-at. The Queen Bee was superseded by the similarly named Queen Wasp, a later, purpose built, target aircraft of higher performance. The de Havilland DH 82 Tiger Moth was a 1930s biplane designed by de Havilland and operated by the Royal Air Force and others as a primary trainer. ... A rare occurance of a 5-country multinational fleet, during Operation Enduring Freedom in the Oman Sea. ... The Airspeed AS.30 Queen Wasp was a British pilotless target aircraft built by Airspeed (1934) Limited at Portsmouth. ...

Military applications in the Second World War

Radio control was further developed during World War II, primarily by the Germans who used it in a number of missile projects. Their main effort was the development of radio-controlled missiles and glide bombs for use against shipping, a target that is otherwise both difficult and dangerous to attack. However by the end of the war the Luftwaffe was having similar problems attacking allied bombers, and developed a number of radio-controlled anti-aircraft missiles, none of which saw service. Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000... It has been suggested that Guided missile be merged into this article or section. ... A glide bomb is an aerial bomb that is modified with aerodynamic surfaces to modify its flight path from a purely ballistic one, to a flatter, gliding, one. ... The Deutsche Luftwaffe or   (German: air force, literally Air Weapon, pronounced lufft-va-fa, IPA: ) is the commonly used term for the German air force. ... The B-17 Flying Fortress is one of the most recognizable and famous bombers of World War II. A bomber is a military aircraft designed to attack ground targets, primarily by dropping bombs. ...

The effectiveness of the Luftwaffe systems was greatly reduced by British efforts to jam their radio signals. After initial successes, the British launched a number of commando raids to collect the missile radio sets. Jammers were then installed on British ships, and the weapons basically "stopped working". The German development teams then turned to wire guidance once they realized what was going on, but these systems were not ready for deployment until the war had already moved to France. For other uses, see Commando (disambiguation). ... A wire-guided missile is a missile guided by signals sent to it via thin wires reeled out during flight. ...

The German Kriegsmarine operated FL-Boote (ferngelenkte Sprengboote) which were radio controlled motor boats filled with explosives to attack enemy shipping from 1944. The Kriegsmarine (or War Navy) was the name of the German Navy between 1935 and 1945, during the Nazi regime, superseding the Reichsmarine. ... A 1962 Rebel. A wooden speedboat with an outboard engine. ...

Both the British and US also developed radio control systems for similar tasks, in order to avoid the huge anti-aircraft batteries set up around German targets. However, none of these systems proved usable in practice, and the one major US effort, Project Aphrodite, proved to be far more dangerous to its users than to the target.

Radio control systems of this era were generally electromechanical in nature, using small metal "fingers" or "reeds" with different resonant frequencies each of which would operate one of a number of different relays when a particular frequency was received. The relays would in turn then activate various actuators acting on the control surfaces of the missile. The controller's radio transmitter would transmit the different frequencies in response to the movements of a control stick; these were typically on/off signals. This article is about resonance in physics. ... Automotive style miniature relay A relay is an electrical switch that opens and closes under the control of another electrical circuit. ... A three-dimensional actuator modelled using elastica theory. ...

These systems were widely used until the 1960s, when the increasing use of solid state systems greatly simplified radio control. The electromechanical systems using reed relays were replaced by similar electronic ones, and the continued miniaturization of electronics allowed more signals, referred to as control channels, to be packed into the same package. While early control systems might have two or three channels using amplitude modulation, modern systems include 20 or more using frequency modulation. In electronics, solid state circuits are those that do not contain vacuum tubes. ... Amplitude modulation (AM) is a technique used in electronic communication, most commonly for transmitting information via a radio carrier wave. ... Frequency modulation (FM) is a form of modulation that represents information as variations in the instantaneous frequency of a carrier wave. ...

Radio-controlled models

The first general use of radio control systems in models started in the early 1950s with single-channel self-built equipment, commercial equipment came later. Hard valve electronics initially used escapement (often rubber driven) mechanical actuation in the model. Commercial sets often used ground standing transmitters, long whip aerials with separate ground poles and single valve receivers. The first kits had dual valves for more selectivity. Such early systems were invariably super-regenerative circuits, which meant that the use of two controllers in close proximity would interfere with each other. The requirement for heavy batteries to drive valves also meant that model boat systems were more successful, though model aircraft needed the service more!

By the early 1960s transistors had ousted the valve and electric motors driving control surfaces were more common. Single-channel gave way to multi channel and reed selection; frequency stability used crystals for selectivity and equipment became more readily available. The constantly diminishing equipment weight was crucial to ever increasing modelling applications. Super-hetrodyne circuits became more common, which enabled several transmitters to operate closely together.

Multi-channel developments were of particular use to aircraft, which really needed a minimum of three control dimensions, (yaw, pitch and speed) as opposed to boats, which can get away with two or one. Radio control 'channels' were originally outputs from a reed array, in other words, a simple on-off switch. To provide a usable control signal a control surface needs to be moved in two directions, so at least two 'channels' would be needed, unless a complex mechanical link could be made to provide two-directional movement from a single switch. Several of these complex links were marketed during the 1960s, including the Graupner Kinematic and the Galloping Ghost. Christoph Graupner (1683 - 1760) was a baroque composer, who composed over 1400 cantatas, 113 Sinfonias, 85 Ouvertures, many chamber works and harpischord pieces. ... In physics, kinematics is the branch of mechanics concerned with the motions of objects without being concerned with the forces that cause the motion. ...

As the electronics revolution took off, single-signal channel circuit design became redundant, and instead radios provided coded signal streams which a servomechanism could interpret. Each of these streams replaced two of the original 'channels', and, confusingly, the signal streams began to be called 'channels'. So an old 6-channel transmitter which could drive the rudder, elevator and throttle of an aircraft was replaced with a new 3-channel transmitter doing the same job. Controlling all the primary controls of a powered aircraft (rudder, elevator, ailerons and throttle) was known as 'full-house' control. A glider could be 'full-house' with only three channels. Small R/C servo mechanism 1. ...

Soon a competitive market place emerged, bringing rapid development. By the 1970s the trend for full-house proportional radio control was fully established. Typical radio control systems for radio-controlled models employ pulse width modulation (PWM), pulse position modulation (PPM) and more recently spread spectrum technology, and actuate the various control surfaces using servomechanisms. These R/C systems made 'proportional control' possible, where the position of the control surface in the model is proportional to the position of the control stick on the transmitter. 1:10 scale radio controlled car (Saab Sonett) A radio-controlled model (or RC model) is a model that is steerable with the use of radio control. ... Pulse-width modulation of a signal or power source involves the modulation of its duty cycle to either convey information over a communications channel or control the amount of power sent to a load. ... Pulse-position modulation is a form of signal modulation in which the message information is encoded in the time delay between pulses in a sequence of signal pulses. ... Spread-spectrum telecommunications is a technique in which a signal is transmitted in a bandwidth considerably greater than the frequency content of the original information. ... Small R/C servo mechanism 1. ... attention A proportional control system is a type of linear feedback control system. ... In mathematics, two quantities are called proportional if they vary in such a way that one of the quantities is a constant multiple of the other, or equivalently if they have a constant ratio. ...

PWM is most commonly used in today's equipment, where transmitter controls change the width (duration) of the pulse for that channel between 920 µs and 2120 µs, 1520 µs being the center (neutral) position. The pulse is repeated in a frame of between 10 and 30 milliseconds in length. Off-the-shelf servos respond directly to pulse trains of this type using integrated decoder circuits, and in response they actuate a rotating arm or lever on the top of the servo. An electric motor and reduction gearbox is used to drive the output arm and a variable component such as a resistor "potentiometer" or tuning capacitor. The variable capacitor or resistor produces an error signal voltage proportional to the output position which is then compared with the position commanded by the input pulse and the motor is driven until a match is obtained. The pulse trains representing the whole set of channels is easily decoded into separate channels at the receiver using very simple circuits such as a Johnson counter. The relative simplicity of this system allows receivers to be small and light, and has been widely used since the early 1970s. To help compare orders of magnitude of different times this page lists times between 10−6 seconds and 10−5 seconds (1. ... One millisecond is one-thousandth of a second. ... Rotating magnetic field as a sum of magnetic vectors from 3 phase coils An electric motor converts electrical energy into mechanical energy. ... Spur gears found on a piece of farm equipment A gear is a wheel with teeth around its circumference, the purpose of the teeth being to mesh with similar teeth on another mechanical device -- possibly another gear wheel -- so that force can be transmitted between the two devices in a... The present popular usage of the term potentiometer (or pot for short) describes an electrical device which has a user-adjustable resistance. ... In general, a counter is a device which stores (and sometimes displays) the number of times a particular event or process has occurred, often in relationship to a clock signal. ... The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, also called The Seventies. ...

More recently, high-end hobby systems using Pulse-Code Modulation (PCM) features have come on the market that provide a computerized digital bit-stream signal to the receiving device, instead of analog type pulse modulation. Advantages include bit error checking capabilities of the data stream (good for signal integrity checking) and fail-safe options including motor (if the model has a motor) throttle down and similar automatic actions based on signal loss. However, those systems that use pulse code modulation generally induce more lag due to lesser frames sent per second as bandwidth is needed for error checking bits. It should also be noted that PCM devices can only detect errors and thus hold the last verfied position or go into failsafe mode. They can not correct transmission errors. A hobby is a spare-time recreational pursuit. ... Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a digital representation of an analog signal where the magnitude of the signal is sampled regularly at uniform intervals, then quantized to a series of symbols in a digital (usually binary) code. ... Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a digital representation of an analog signal where the magnitude of the signal is sampled regularly at uniform intervals, then quantized to a series of symbols in a digital (usually binary) code. ... The NASA Columbia Supercomputer. ... A digital system is one that uses discrete values (often electrical voltages), especially those representable as binary numbers, or non-numeric symbols such as letters or icons, for input, processing, transmission, storage, or display, rather than a continuous spectrum of values (ie, as in an analog system). ... This article is about the unit of information. ... Bit error indicates the number of bits of a data stream over a communication channel that have been altered by noise. ... Fail Safe is an episode from Season 5 of the science fiction television series Stargate SG-1. ... Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a digital representation of an analog signal where the magnitude of the signal is sampled regularly at uniform intervals, then quantized to a series of symbols in a digital (usually binary) code. ...

Modern military and aerospace applications

Remote control military applications are typically not radio control in the direct sense, directly operating flight control surfaces and propulsion power settings, but instead take the form of instructions sent to a completely autonomous, computerized automatic pilot. Instead of a "turn left" signal that is applied until the aircraft is flying in the right direction, the system sends a single instruction that says "fly to this point". An autopilot is a mechanical, electrical, or hydraulic system used to guide a vehicle without assistance from a human being. ...

Some of the most outstanding examples of remote radio control of a vehicle are the Mars Exploration Rovers such as Sojourner. Artists Concept of Rover on Mars (credit: Maas Digital LLC) NASAs Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Mission is an ongoing robotic mission of exploring Mars, that began in 2003 with the sending of two rovers — Spirit and Opportunity — to explore the Martian surface and geology. ...

Industrial control

Today radio control is used in industry for such devices as overhead cranes and switchyard locomotives. Radio-controlled teleoperators are used for such purposes as inspections, and special vehicles for disarming of bombs. Some remotely-controlled devices are loosely called robots, but are more properly categorized as teleoperators since they do not operate autonomously, but only under control of a human operator. A modern crawler type derrick crane with outriggers. ... Great Western Railway No. ... Telepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance that they were present, or to have an effect, at a location other than their true location. ... The Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb produced in the United States. ... ASIMO, a humanoid robot manufactured by Honda. ...

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Radio Control

• Model Fire Boats
• Radio-controlled model
• Radio-controlled car
• Radio-controlled boat
• Radio-controlled airplane
• Radio-controlled helicopter
• Teletank

Image File history File links Commons-logo. ... 1:10 scale radio controlled car (Saab Sonett) A radio-controlled model (or RC model) is a model that is steerable with the use of radio control. ... A Team Associated Nitro TC-3 model four wheel drive nitro touring car. ... A radio-controlled boat is a boat controlled remotely with radio control equipment. ... ParkZone Slo-V Radio-controlled airplanes (also called RC airplanes) are small airplanes that can be controlled remotely. ... Nitro-powered Thunder Tiger Raptor 60 Electric-powered Align T-rex 450SE Radio controlled (RC) helicopters are model aircraft which are distinct from RC airplanes because of the differences in construction, aerodynamics, and flight training. ... TT-26 teletank A teletank is a remotely controlled unmanned tank used in combat to minimize human casualties. ...

External links

• The RC Zone - One of the worlds largest radio control hobby forums
• RCGroups.com - RC community
• RC Universe - RC Community. Forums, classifieds, magazine, product guide
• Video of RC airplanes and an RC club in Yucatan Mexico