The US Department of Transportation says that in 1994 alone, lane changes and lane merger crashes were the cause of 244,000 crashes, causing 225 deaths and many serious injuries. That is largely down to the poor view afforded by wing mirrors, says Andrew Hicks, a mathematician at Drexel University in Philadelphia, in a recent patent application.
Mirrors usually have a curved design, which is supposed to increase the field of view. But Hicks says that also introduces distortion to a dangerous degree, causing drivers to make wrong judgements about the position of their car relative to other objects.
Due to advances in diamond turning machining processes that were funded by the US defense agency DARPA in the late 1990’s, it has become now possible to create high quality optical surfaces of almost any shape. Hicks’ intends to combine those with sophisticated mathematical models to design and create the perfect curved wing mirror surface – with an increased field of view but no distortion.
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