Robocars promise to improve traffic even when most of the cars around them are driven by people, study finds
Robotic vehicles can optimize the flow of traffic in cities even when mixed in with vehicles driven by humans, thereby improving traffic efficiency, safety and energy consumption, my colleagues and I found.
Robot vehicles are no longer a sci-fi concept: Cities around the world have been testing autonomous robotaxis since 2016. With the increasing presence of robot vehicles in traffic and the foreseeable long period of transitioning from mixed traffic to fully autonomous traffic, my team and I wondered whether robot vehicles and their interactions with human-driven vehicles can alleviate today’s notorious traffic problems.
I am a computer scientist who studies artificial intelligence for transportation and smart cities. My colleagues and I hypothesized that as the number of robot vehicles in traffic increases, we can harness AI to develop algorithms to control the complex mixed traffic system. These algorithms would not only enable all vehicles to travel smoothly from point A to point B but, more importantly, optimize overall traffic by allowing robot vehicles to affect vehicles driven by people.
To test our hypothesis, we used a branch of AI known as reinforcement learning, in which an intelligent agent learns to maximize cumulative rewards through interaction with its environment. By setting rewards for simulated robot vehicles to prioritize goals such as traffic efficiency or energy consumption, our experiments show that we can effectively manage mixed traffic at complex real-world intersections under real-world traffic conditions in simulation.