Engineers at EPFL have developed a predictive control model that allows swarms of drones to fly in cluttered environments quickly and safely. It works by enabling individual drones to predict their own behaviour and that of their neighbours in the swarm. There is strength in numbers. By flying in a swarm, they can cover larger areas and collect a wider range of data, since each drone can be equipped with different sensors. One reason why drone swarms haven't been used more widely is the risk of gridlock within the swarm.

There is strength in numbers. By flying in a swarm, they can cover larger areas and collect a wider range of data, since each drone can be equipped with different sensors. Preventing drones from bumping into each other One reason why drone swarms haven't been used more widely is the risk of gridlock within the swarm. Studies on the collective movement of animals show that each agent tends to coordinate its movements with the others, adjusting its trajectory so as to keep a safe inter-agent distance or to travel in alignment, for example. "In a drone swarm, when one drone changes its trajectory to avoid an obstacle, its neighbors automatically synchronize their movements accordingly," says Dario Floreano, a professor at EPFL's School of Engineering and head of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS).

Autonomous vehicles could transform parking as well as driving, new research suggests. Parking lots could house more driverless cars than human-driven ones, but autonomous vehicles could also lead to nightmarish gridlock if they slowly cruise the streets waiting for their owners, instead of paying to park. The typical vehicle spends 95 percent of its lifetime parked. The need to store parked vehicles has turned a lot of potentially valuable real estate into parking garages--for example, in the United States, roughly 6,500 square miles of land is devoted to parking, which is larger than the entire state of Connecticut. Autonomous vehicles could, in principle, transform parking lots.

London is a truly remarkable city – an economic powerhouse and a cultural destination without equal. But it's a terrible irony that this fast-moving, fast-living, fast-earning metropolis is stuck in traffic so much of the time. According to traffic data company INRIX, London is – unsurprisingly – the UK's most congested city. Each motorist is spending approximately 74 hours a year in gridlock during peak times. And the effect on the environment is devastating – the mayor of London's office concluded in 2017 that road transport in London was responsible for half of the main air pollutants in the capital.

The future of the driverless car is going to affect the future of how we travel and what we do in cars. But driverless cars are also likely to transform roads, cities, suburbs, jobs, the economy and daily life. My guest Samuel Schwartz expects it to be a very disruptive technology. Schwartz is the author of the new book "No One At The Wheel: Driverless Cars And The Road Of The Future," which he says is about the good, the bad and the ugly of how driverless cars will change our world. He knows a lot about transportation systems. He served as the traffic commissioner of New York City and chief engineer of the city's Department of Transportation. He now has his own consulting firm and has worked with cities around the world on transportation-related issues. Later in our conversation, after we talk about the future, we're going to talk about traffic problems that plague us today. We're going to use the words driverless car interchangeably with the words autonomous vehicle, or AV. In your book, you write that AVs, autonomous vehicles, will be the most disruptive technology to hit society worldwide since the advent of the motorcar. Give us a couple of examples of industries or jobs or roadways that we might not realize will be profoundly affected by AVs once they start to really dominate. SAMUEL SCHWARTZ: I think everybody is expecting fewer drivers, and, you know, that's no surprise. But it also means that there're probably going to be fewer repair shops because AVs lend themselves to fleet operations, especially if they're going to be offering rides, as opposed to selling maximum vehicles. So car dealerships may disappear. So this is going to have wide impacts. Truckers, of course, are going to be impacted - how we move about in so many different ways.

It's easy to think that once cars start driving themselves most of our traffic woes will be eliminated. Robocars are supposed to be better drivers and better driving should mean less gridlock. Unfortunately, that drop in bumper to bumper hell won't be as big as we all hoped, according to Audi's research. At Audi's Charged event (where it will unveil the E-Tron), the automaker gave Engadget a sneak peek at its latest 25th Hour Flow research. The company (along with Karlsruhe Institute for Technology and Munich's MobilityPartners) peered into the future to see how drivers and passengers can reclaim time thanks to autonomous driving and mobility options. During this year's research, Audi looked at traffic flow in Ingolstadt, Germany the home of its headquarters.

The rise of driverless cars and autonomous vehicles has led many to believe that the end of public transportation is nigh. From improving driving conditions to safer roads, the innovative technology promises to revolutionize how people move in modern cities. But even though driverless cars may offer relief for many of the problems plaguing individuals in cities, they will not resolve the biggest rising issue in urban transportation: gridlock. The issue of city congestion goes well beyond who's behind the wheel, whether man or machine. Having more cars on the road, even if they are autonomous, will generally lead to higher congestion.

AeroMobil released its flying car for consumer orders. As expected, the price tag will be hefty and you'll have to wait for a while before it comes home with you. The Aeromobil, a flying supercar, is on display as part of the "Top Marques" show, dedicated to exclusive luxury goods, in Monaco April 20, 2017. SAN FRANCISCO -- So here's just how fast technology is accelerating. We haven't even nailed down self-driving cars yet, and now the buzz is all about flying cars.

As part of our look back over the last 70 years, we created this quiz all about British motoring from 1946 to 2016.But enough about the past – we've always got one eye on the future, with exciting new developments happening in the automotive industry all the time. Right now, electric cars are growing in popularity, in-car infotainment tech is getting more and more impressive, and manufacturers are working with governments to make self-driving cars a reality. Within the next decade, Britain's roads could begin looking very different. In the year 2086, how might the motoring world have changed? There will be some major changes over the next 70 years.

Looking ahead to the time when autonomous cars will be common, Dresner and Stone proposed a multiagent systems-based intersection control protocol called Autonomous Intersection Management (AIM). They showed that by leveraging the capacities of autonomous vehicles it is possible to dramatically reduce the time wasted in traffic, and therefore also fuel consumption and air pollution. The proposed protocol, however, handles reservation requests one at a time and does not prioritize reservations according to their relative priorities and waiting times, causing potentially large inequalities in granting reservations. For example, at an intersection between a main street and an alley, vehicles from the alley can take an excessively long time to get reservations to enter the intersection, causing a waste of time and fuel. The same is true in a network of intersections, in which gridlock may occur and cause traffic congestion. In this paper, we introduce the batch processing of reservations in AIM to enforce liveness properties in intersections and analyze the conditions under which no vehicle will get stuck in traffic. Our experimental results show that our prioritizing schemes outperform previous intersection control protocols in unbalanced traffic.