So, heads up – you’ll have to click the link to watch the video. It’s not YouTube, so I can’t rip it and embed it because I’m an 80-year old man trapped in a 30-year old man’s body. Still, definitely worth checking out – it’s borderline hypnotic.
Courtesy of MIT Technology Review:
You’ve likely seen the demonstration of phantom traffic jams where cars drive around in a circle to simulate the impact of a single slowing car on a road full of traffic. One car pumps its brakes for no particular reason, and the slowdown ripples through the traffic. Now, the University of Illinois research, led by Daniel Work, shows that placing even just a single autonomous car into one of those circular traffic simulations can dampen the effects of the phantom traffic jam.
The team’s results show that by having an autonomous vehicle control its speed intelligently when a phantom jam starts to propagate, it’s possible to reduce the amount of braking performed further back down the line. The numbers are impressive: the presence of just one autonomous car reduces the standard deviation in speed of all the cars in the jam by around 50 percent, and the number of sharp hits to the brakes is cut from around nine per vehicle for every kilometer traveled to at most 2.5—and sometimes practically zero.
Because fuel use increases when when cars slow down and have to get back up to speed, the presence of the autonomous vehicle also reduces fuel consumption. According to the calculations by the team, in fact, the savings is as much as 40 percent when averaged across all the cars in the traffic flow.
THE FUTURE, MOTHERFUCKERS.
What are those things called that babies watch in their cribs? It like…hangs above ’em with the stars and the moon and all that shit and sometimes it spins around and it soothes them? That thing – that’s what this is like for me. Pretty sure if I’m having trouble sleeping from now on, I’m going to come back to this video.
So, even if their findings didn’t mean shit for the future of autonomous vehicles, it is a breakthrough in sleep-aid technology.
But, doesn’t this make you stop and think about how stupid humans are? Here’s this robot, one that doesn’t have a brain, and it’s easing traffic jams all on its own. These traffic jams are caused by what? “One car pumps its brakes for no particular reason, and the slowdown ripples through the traffic.” No. Particular. Reason.
We see it all the time traversing the terrible Nashville traffic each morning. Turns out, it’s a huge source of traffic jams everywhere. Crazy. But, if you take the stupid humans out of the equation, these robot cars can handle traffic flow pretty well.
I can’t even fathom a highway full of cars not stopping for nothing. A continuous flow of traffic into a city? This is where the talk on autonomous vehicles gets too lofty for me. You can tell me they’re going to make travel easier, it’s going to cut down on pollution, but when you say ‘there will be no more traffic,’ that’s when I think you’re a lunatic. This is a damn pipe dream. Next thing you know, people are going to be talking about robots that you can have straight up animal sex with. So unrealistic.
And, in case you’re wondering what my serious thoughts on autonomous vehicles are – they’re inevitable. They’re going to alleviate a lot of our problems, but I’m sorry – it is not going to happen by 2020. The general public is going to take longer than we expect to warm up to the idea, and our slow-moving government will want to regulate every tiny aspect of them….so, my official over/under is 2025.
Stoney Keeley is the Editor in Chief of The SoBros Network. A strong advocate of GSD (get shit done) and #BeBetter, he’s down to talk Tennessee Titans and Alabama Crimson Tide football over a beer any day. Check him out covering the WWE for WrestlingNews.co. Follow on Twitter @StoneyKeeley, @WrestlingNewsCo
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