An MIT Professor has developed a new bilateral-control algorithm which will be useful for eliminating unexplained Traffic Jam when implementing it with adaptive cruise-control systems of the cars.
Berthold Horn, the professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, presented this new algorithm for alleviating traffic flow instabilities at this month’s IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transport Systems. His algorithm is for eliminating the unexplained traffic jams which are NOT caused by actual problems like accident or construction.
Currently, a car with adaptive cruise control uses sensors, such as radar or laser rangefinders, to monitor the speed and distance of the car in front of it. That way, the driver doesn’t have to turn the cruise control off when traffic gets backed up: The car will automatically slow when it needs to and return to its programmed speed when possible.
But according to Horn algorithm, the system should look at both directions “front” and “rear” at once. So, Horn describes it as “bilateral control.” This new algorithm can be implemented by doing little variations to the current adaptive cruise control system.
The below Traffic simulation clearly shows the advantage of Horn’s algorithm.
The bilateral-control algorithm is switched on at the one-minute mark in this sample flow. Watch the below video showing the sample Traffic flow. (This video is created based on this original GIF image to avoid image loading issue)
Horn’s algorithm works, however, only if a large percentage of cars are using it. And laser rangefinders and radar systems are relatively costly pieces of hardware, which is one of the reasons that adaptive cruise control has remained a high-end option.
Anyway, the cost of these hardware will come down once mass production starts for these devices. Mostly Google’s Self-driving Car initiative will trigger mass production of rangefinders in new future.
The real obstacle to the system’s adoption is not technical but psychological. “Generally, drivers really worry about what is good for me, rather than what is good for the whole platoon or the community of vehicles that are moving on this road with me,” Trivedi, a California University professor says.
