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I hate to be overly negative but this seems not thought through at all. Is this a published paper? Because this seems like the kind of thing that would pop out
by dpark 1y ago
I hate to be overly negative but this seems not thought through at all. Is this a published paper? Because this seems like the kind of thing that would pop out of a Reddit thread involving a bunch of tech enthusiasts and zero people with any expertise.
If we just take it as a given that we should allow autonomous cars to self-coordinate traffic intersections (a big if), this proposal still makes no sense. The traffic light is actively yielding control to the autonomous cars. In that case, just let the autonomous cars set the traffic signal appropriately.
You don’t need a “warning” light to tell drivers that autonomous cars are in charge. You need to set the traffic light to the right states. If you can’t do that safely, 100% you’re saying that you can’t let autonomous cars control the flow of traffic through the intersection.
This whole “just follow the car in front of you” directive is a poor attempt to handwave away human drivers. “Look, if we can just make the humans drive as if they are autonomous, there won’t be any issues at all.” It’s absurd and shipping a system like this would be criminally negligent. “Just follow the car in front of you” is not just a lazy answer. It’s nonsense guidance when you need to make a left and the autonomous car in front of you is going straight. “Oops. We forgot drivers sometimes need to turn.”
- ulrikrasmussen 1y agoWhen I took my drivers license the mantra was "NEVER just follow the car in front of you. Make your own judgement". I agree with all your points, this seems like a retarded idea by people who don't understand the basics of traffic safety.
- dpark 1y agoI’m shocked that the first author on this paper is civil engineer with a focus on traffic control. I don’t understand how anyone could think this makes sense.
- LiKao 1y agoJust letting the cars set the light would not work for some of the plans with autonomous cars. Currently with cars you need green-red periods. But some researchers are considering scenarios, where in the future the cars just reserve the intersection for a few seconds and then pass through. That would be a lot of flickering between green and red. There are scenarios and simulations where they show that we can get a lot more (fuel and time) efficient if we just let cars pass by each other in these reserved time windows. In many of these scenarios cars just go over the intersection at full speed during their reserved time windows. NOTE: I am just reporting on what I know other researchers are currently investigating and proposing. I am not saying I think this is a good idea. At least I would consider this a security nightmare, because hackers could very easily have cars crashing into each other at full speed. Also I would be very very worried passing through an intersection behind an autonomous car and just trusting that this car not only reserved their window, but also reserved some additional time for me.
- dpark 1y ago> because hackers could very easily have cars crashing into each other at full speed. Not just hackers. If we assume that cars would be weaving through the intersection at full speed, human drivers are going to do dumb stuff and cause high speed collisions. “Just fly through the intersection at 70 miles an hour… Follow the car in front of me… Make my left turn… CRASH.” For that matter a dog running into the intersection is likely to cause a high speed collision. Implicit in the assumption that the time savings comes from this “fast flickering” and allowing cars to speed through the intersection in small windows is the fact that the safety margins are very small.