During my university years I used to bore everyone I could with this idea. I became quite obsessed with it and spent a lot of time working on simulations, the basic idea being that if we modelled a road network as a DAG, with intersections as vertices and "segments" (sections of a road between any two intersections) as edges, then the network itself could route traffic, allowing for balancing of load, priority of emergency vehicles, etc. An individual segment would be responsible for the transit of each of the vehicles on it, and each intersection would be responsible for transiting each vehicle through. The vehicles themselves would just be told what to do.
One of the main benefits I was interested in was the notion that an efficient network would likely mean that the speed of the vehicles could be brought right down to something pedestrian friendly.
Over the last few years I've watched with horror the version of autonomous vehicles that we seem to be getting, and I keep telling myself I'll dust off my old prototype and share it, but then paying the rent gets in the way (as an aside, the code has proven to be of some use - it forms the core of jsPlumb's Toolkit edition). I must admit to being increasingly skeptical of my original idea, though. As someone else mentioned, defining the interface between pedestrians and one of these autonomous vehicles is tricky. The easiest thing to do would be to completely ban pedestrians from the space used by the vehicles, which would be awful.
One of the main benefits I was interested in was the notion that an efficient network would likely mean that the speed of the vehicles could be brought right down to something pedestrian friendly.
Over the last few years I've watched with horror the version of autonomous vehicles that we seem to be getting, and I keep telling myself I'll dust off my old prototype and share it, but then paying the rent gets in the way (as an aside, the code has proven to be of some use - it forms the core of jsPlumb's Toolkit edition). I must admit to being increasingly skeptical of my original idea, though. As someone else mentioned, defining the interface between pedestrians and one of these autonomous vehicles is tricky. The easiest thing to do would be to completely ban pedestrians from the space used by the vehicles, which would be awful.