
The Scary Efficiency of Autonomous Intersections - simonebrunozzi
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/the-scary-efficiency-of-autonomous-intersections
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mslot
I developed something similar for my PhD thesis, which works in a
decentralized way using an ad-hoc network:
[http://thesis.marcoslot.net/merrion.htm](http://thesis.marcoslot.net/merrion.htm)

(press play, you can click cars and enable visualizations)

The system analyzes the driving tracks in the map and finds potential conflict
areas. Cars require permission from other cars they might conflict with to
enter into a conflict area. To deal with communication failure, they also need
confirmation that there are no other cars in the (relevant) area than the ones
that responded, which they can determine by sharing and combining LIDAR data
and correcting the observations for delays.

When receiving a request from another car, a car can decide to respond with
accept (if no conflict), reject (if the responder is competing for the same
area and has a lower eta or identifier), or tentatively accept (if the
responder already got confirmation), which builds a directed, acyclic graph
determining the order in which cars can cross. Cars build a trajectory through
all the upcoming conflict areas and can enter the next conflict area in the
trajectory if all the cars that tentatively accepted have passed it in their
trajectory. If this cannot be confirmed through messages from those cars,
LIDAR can again be used to confirm that the preceding cars left the area (or
did not enter before the deadline).

It improves efficiency quite a lot, though it's slightly academic in the sense
that it assumes there are only autonomous cars and no radio jammers or liars.
Everything freezes if there is a human car, since safety cannot be confirmed,
though this can be solved by combining it with (more probabilistic)
recognition algorithms. The thesis mostly focuses on the distributed systems
aspect and how to preserve safety in case of communication failure. There's
some ongoing work on applying it to lane changing scenarios, where it can be
effective even if only a relatively small percentage of cars support it.

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3pt14159
I'm in Hanoi for three weeks and it's scary how similar the Vietnamese driving
patterns are to these autonomous intersections. People stop only for the
_largest_ of intersections, although the average crusing speed is much lower.

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ChuckMcM
Not sure why it is "scary", any more than it would be scary being an anchovy
in a school of anchovies. I think it would be interesting if they added in
pedestrians who had to be avoided.

~~~
roflchoppa
its scary because i want my self driving car to go 150 miles an hour at all
times

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daredevildave
Funnily enough the results of our AI for The Getaway on PS2 led to a very
similar result. We had to tone it all down to make it look like actual London
traffic. :-)

