ON THE ROAD WITH ALVINN

The divided highway lances through the beauties of a Pennsylvania dawn, morning frost glinting across the hills below. It's hard to enjoy the natural wonders, though, when ALVINN is behind the wheel, doing 88 km/h in the fast lane. First he lurches right, crossing both lanes of the blacktop and alarming bleary-eyed commuters trying to share the road. Then he careens to the left, skidding onto the gravel shoulder and nearly into a ditch. Finally Todd Jochem, 27, a graduate student at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, wrests the wheel of the four-wheel-drive Humvee from ALVINN while Dean Pomerleau, a C.M.U. robotics...

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