

Computers may control intersections for self-driving cars - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/251260/computers-may-control-intersections-self-driving-cars

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malandrew
TBH, if you are going to have smart intersections controlling autonomous cars,
you might as well try to move to roundabouts as much as possible.

Roundabouts provide continuous flow and probably represent a much more
solvable problem since it involves attenuating the speed of approaching
vehicles and vehicles currently circling. I imagine throwing stopping into the
mix complicates things significantly

I imagine that computers could completely prevent shockwave traffic jams.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suugn-p5C1M>

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baddox
I suspect roundabouts are also more expensive and take up more space than
traditional cross intersections.

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malandrew
Surprisingly, I've often heard the following argument (except your point about
space). Traditional intersections, despite being cheaper to install, are less
economical from a total cost of ownership and all associated externalities
perspective

The other benefit of roundabouts is they provide a much simpler situation for
cars to encounter, since the intersection could be dumb and simpler heuristics
should be able to resolve the management of traffic. A simple four way stop
sign wouldn't be too hard, but I can't imagine trying to figure out much less
optimize a complex highly trafficked 4 way intersection. A 4 way intersection
basically forces you to coordinate centrally to optimize, instead of
distributing the logic among participants in the intersection and only putting
in central coordinating logic when traffic is very heavy. And even then, I'd
expect it more to provide information to the vehicles entering about the
vehicles already present and about to enter and letting the vehicles decide
what is best.

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davidjohnstone
I've always thought that "smart intersections" were an obvious step to be made
when we have self-driving cars. It's nice to see work is being done on this
front.

I would be interested to see if the intersections we already have could be
made a bit smarter, especially when the roads aren't so busy. If computer
vision was used to tell that cars were coming, then the lights could be smart
enough to change when needed, and the lights shouldn't need to rigidly cycle
through everything to let that one car go through.

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enf
When you are making the lights anticipate the every move of cars, please make
them anticipate the every move of pedestrians too.

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cdi
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7_lwq3BfkY> vs
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVo4XHXZp1c>

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andersh
Self-driving cars need to have their windows blacked out.

