Читать книгу Robot, Take the Wheel - Jason Torchinsky - Страница 21

Well, “highway” is a bit generous, since this was just a four hundred-­foot stretch of road, but you get the idea. A Nebraska state traffic engineer named Leland Hancock was very taken by the idea of automatic control of cars on the highway to help combat driver error and fatigue, and to prevent accidents, and was determined to get others interested in the idea. Thanks to a lot of determined letter writing, he was able to get researchers at the RCA Corporation to work with him. Together they arranged to lay coils of wire at the intersection of US Route 77 and Nebraska Highway 2 as the roads were being built.14

On October 10, 1957, the development team carried out a test, witnessed by eighty-three people. Using a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air with antenna coils mounted on the bumper, a special meter in the car, and a partially obstructed windshield, a driver was able to drive on the road and follow its course by watching the deviation of the meter’s needle. If the car got too close to a car in front of it, an alarm sounded, ringing a bell and flashing a light until the car slowed down enough to open the distance to an acceptable level.

While the car wasn’t doing the driving, relying on a person to actuate the controls, it did replace the human driver’s need for vision; if researchers had chosen to, the system could have been rigged to actuate the car’s controls directly.