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Old 08-25-2008, 11:58 AM   #2 (permalink)
pasadena_commut
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Thalass View Post
Hey folks. I was thinking about this on the way to work the other day. Would it be possible to have an R/C type servo inside the mirror (the ones on my car are quite large, and should have a fair volume inside that's empty) to pull in and deploy the mirrors as needed?
Had the same idea a while back and decided that it wasn't going to work. The problem for me is that normally I don't use the side mirrors, but when I do it's always a quick glance before a lane change. Having to deploy the mirror, then glance, then stow it again, was going to take too long.

Rather than just replacing mirrors with side cameras I was thinking that LIDAR might be interesting. The ranging information could be displayed directly under the rear view mirror, and formatted to show a top view of the car being driven and the positions, and probably the relative velocities (color coded?), of the neighboring vehicles. I think that in terms of safety and accident avoidance it would be better than either mirrors or cameras. Of course this is very expensive hardware at the moment, but it is under active development for the DARPA autonomous vehicle projects, for instance here: Welcome. The DARPA vehicles tend to use big round humps on the roof to house the scanner, but it could probably be built into the tail light housings, perhaps with a bit of protrusion to give a wider scan field on each side. Having slightly bulbous taillights should not cause too much drag, certainly less then the side mirrors that they replace.
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