Replacing the stop sign: unmanaged intersection control for autonomous vehicles

ABSTRACT

As computers replace humans as the drivers of automobiles, our current traffic management mechanisms will give way to hyper-efficient protocols designed to exploit the capabilities of fully autonomous vehicles. We have introduced such a system for coordinating large numbers of autonomous vehicles at intersections [2, 3]. Our experiments suggest that this system could alleviate many of the dangers and delays associated with intersections by allowing vehicles to "call ahead" to an agent stationed at the intersection and reserve time and space for their traversal. Unfortunately, such a system is not cost-effective at small intersections. In this paper, we propose an intersection control mechanism for autonomous vehicles designed specifically for low-traffic intersections where the previous system would not be practical. Our mechanism is based on purely peer-to-peer communication and thus requires no infrastructure at the intersection. We present experimental results demonstrating that our system, while not suited to large, busy intersections, can significantly outperform traditional stop signs at small intersections.

REFERENCES

• 1: The DARPA urban challenge, 2007. http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge.
• 2: Kurt Dresner , Peter Stone, Multiagent Traffic Management: A Reservation-Based Intersection Control Mechanism, Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, p.530-537, July 19-23, 2004, New York, New York [doi>10.1109/AAMAS.2004.190]
• 3: Kurt Dresner , Peter Stone, Multiagent traffic management: an improved intersection control mechanism, Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, July 25-29, 2005, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/1082473.1082545]
• 4: K. Dresner and P. Stone. Sharing the road: Autonomous vehicles meet human drivers. In Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 1263--68, Hyderabad, India, January 2007.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Keywords:
autonomous vehicles, intelligent transportation systems, intersection control, multiagent systems