Self-Driving Robotic Cars

Abstract

Even the behavior of a single driver can have a dramatic impact on hundreds of cars, making it more difficult to manage traffic. While the attempts to analyze and correct the traffic patterns that lead to congestion began as early in the 1930s, it wasn't until recently that scientists developed simulation techniques and advanced algorithms to create more realistic visualizations of traffic flow. In experiments conducted by Alexandre Bayen and the Liao-Cho, which included several dozen cars in a small-scale closed circuit, a single autonomous vehicle could eliminate traffic jams by moderating the speed of every car on the road. In larger simulations, the research showed that once their number rises to 5-10% of all cars in the traffic, they can manage localized traffic even in complex environments, such as merging multiple lanes of traffic into two or navigating extremely busy sections.