He said one of the exciting things about it is that it builds on technology that is already in many new cars. Liam Pedersen is deputy general manager for research at Nissan who was in Nashville last week for the experiment. The researchers were able to evaluate the effect the connected cars had on morning traffic flow using a special 4-mile stretch of I-24 outfitted with 300 pole-mounted sensors. That plan was then broadcast to the cars, which used artificial intelligence algorithms to determine the best action to take. At the cloud level, information about traffic conditions was used to create an overall speed plan. In the experiment, the adaptive cruise control in each car was modified to react to the overall traffic flow - including what was happening far ahead - using artificial intelligence.ĭaniel Work, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University, tells the Associated Press the decision-making by the connected cars occurred on two levels. Working on the premise that if 5% of the cars on the road were acting together they could lessen the prevalence of phantom traffic jams, the researchers equipped those 100 cars so they could communicate with each other wirelessly and send traffic information back and forth between all the cars. It used 100 cars that traveled in loops from about 6 a.m. Recently, the researchers conducted an experiment on a 15-mile long section of Interstate 24 near Nashville, Tennessee. It can take minutes or even hours for the slow down to clear. Soon, everybody behind has jammed on their brakes and traffic slows or comes to a halt. The car in front taps the brakes because a squirrel is crossing the road or the driver wants to gawk at an accident on the other side of the highway. Humans just aren’t very good at operating automobiles under such conditions. Within a few minutes, clumps of cars were stopped at one part of the track while other drivers were racing to catch up to the cars ahead. Drivers in 20 identical cars were asked to drive at a constant speed around a circular track. The idea for CIRCLES comes from an experiment conducted in Japan a decade ago. Toyota North America, General Motors, and Nissan are also involved in the research effort. The CIRCLES ResearchĬIRCLES is composed of researchers at UC Berkeley and the Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) Berkeley, in coordination with Vanderbilt University, University of Arizona, Temple University, Rutgers University-Camden, the Tennessee Department of Transportation. The CIRCLES project seeks to extend this technology to real world traffic, where reducing these negative traffic effects could provide ≥10% energy savings. Prior work on closed-course testing demonstrated that phantom jams can be reduced using autonomous vehicle technologies and specially designed algorithms. If you have ever encountered a temporary traffic jam for no apparent reason, this might have been a phantom jam that occurred naturally because of human driving behavior. With a name like that, it’s no wonder the researchers decided to use an acronym!Īccording to its website, CIRCLES seeks to reduce instabilities in traffic flow, called “phantom jams,” that cause congestion and waste energy. That’s the theory behind a research program called CIRCLES, an acronym that stands for Congestion Impacts Reduction via CAV-in-the-loop Lagrangian Energy Smoothing. Connected cars and artificial intelligence could reduce or eliminate most highway congestion.
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