Making Self-driven Vehicles a Reality!

To make self-driving vehicles a reality and to bring them on roads, they need to be able to safely and flawlessly navigate traffic without collisions or jams. Northwestern University researchers have made this possible by developing the first decentralized algorithm with a collision-free guarantee. The algorithm was tested in a simulation of 1,024 robots and in a throng of 100 real robots by the researchers in the laboratory. The robots carefully and efficiently followed to form a command shape. "If you have many autonomous vehicles on the road, you don't want them to collide with one another or get stuck in a deadlock," said Northwestern's Michael Rubenstein, who led the study. "By understanding how to control our swarm robots to form shapes, we can understand how to control fleets of autonomous vehicles as they interact with each other."