Читать книгу Robot, Take the Wheel - Jason Torchinsky - Страница 14

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 torpedo (named for the fish/ray that likes to shock its prey) was just a little unmanned boat that could be launched along the surface of the water to hit an enemy boat, detonate, and—hopefully for the launcher—sink the enemy boat.

Whitehead added some crucial innovations to the torpedo, and those innovations are what made it the first environment-­reactive vehicle: it could keep to a constant, set depth under the surface and it could stay on a fixed course toward its target. Together, these were the makings of the first, crude guidance system, and the first time any inanimate object could really control its direction and compensate to maintain it, even with environmental inputs acting upon it.

To do this, Whitehead installed two pieces of equipment in the torpedo: a horizontal rudder controlled by pendulum balance (to maintain depth) and a hydrostatic valve (a one-way, pressure-­relieving valve), and a gyroscope system driving a vertical rudder to keep it on course. These systems allowed the torpedo to control its path on two dimensions, with the third (forward travel) dimension provided by a three-cylinder radial-compressed air engine.

The pendulum-and-hydrostat control of depth is ingenious. A hydrostat senses the depth, but does not control the horizontal rudder directly; if it did the torpedo would oscillate around the desired depth without ever really settling. The pendulum swings based on the pitch of the torpedo, and is connected to the rudder control in such a way that it can dampen the oscillations, providing much steadier control over the depth of the torpedo. The pendulum-and-hydrostat device was such a big deal at the time that it was called the “Whitehead Secret,”4 and the same fundamental design was used all the way up to World War II.

The gyroscopic control for azimuth/yaw control came in 1895—prior to that, the azimuth (you know, direction, basically) was set with vanes by hand. The gyroscope in the Whitehead torpedo was spun up via a spring, and acted on the vertical rudder via gimbals. This kept the torpedo on a straight, direct path regardless of whatever forces (such as ocean currents) were acting upon it.