摘要: |
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) commonly known as self-driving vehicles have captured the attention
of the public for decades and continue to be the center of attention of academic and industrial
research activities worldwide. Their proliferation has rapidly grown, largely as a result of Vehicleto-
X (or V2X) technology which refers to an intelligent transportation system where all vehicles and
infrastructure components are interconnected with each other. Therefore, the term “CAV”, which is
short for connected and autonomous vehicles, was coined. The connected here not only refers to
the connections to infrastructures, such as traffic signals and GPS information, but also includes
the communication among vehicles in the same vicinity. Connected and autonomous vehicles
(CAVs) will have a profound impact on various aspects of urban mobility, such as safety, energy
usage, and environmental sustainability, which are considered as the driving change for smart
cities. The CAV technology provides an intriguing opportunity to better monitor transportation network
conditions, which in turn helps optimize traffic flows, enhance safety, reduce congestion, and
minimize emissions. Recent developments in artificial intelligence would make this once science
fiction-sounding idea into reality.
This project is going to address the safety and energy efficiency issues of CAVs approaching
and departing multiple signalized intersections. The alarming state of existing transportation
systems has been well documented from various aspects. From the safety perspective, an estimated
165000 accidents occur annually in intersections caused by red light runners, where about
800-1000 cases are fatal. From the energy perspective, for instance, in 2014, congestion caused
vehicles in urban areas to spend 6.9 billion additional hours on the road at a cost of an extra 3.1
billion gallons of fuel, resulting in a total cost estimated at $160 billion. The novelty of the proposal
lies in establishing a framework by combining emerging Artificial Intelligent (AI) technologies
and traditional control and optimization approaches to deal with existing challenges of trajectory
planning of CAVs approaching and departing signalized intersections. The first question that this
project addresses is the traffic signal phase detection. Traffic signal phase detection and recognition
is an important application for AVs aiding and providing information about decision making
on intersections. Second, we will develop an energy efficient and safe algorithm for CAVs to approach
and depart signalized intersections based on identified traffic phase information. Next, we
will extend this framework to the mixed traffic case of CAVs and human-driven vehicles (HDVs).
This analysis will be carried out using machine learning and reinforcement learning approaches
based on collected data in a simulation environment. Developed algorithms and results will be
extensively tested through software simulation, such as MATLAB, and SUMO. In addition, robotic
cars will be used for the hardware testing.
The research results developed in this project will be disseminated in conferences to academia
and industry. They will also be incorporated into existing courses (EE 3530 Introduction to Control
Engineering; EE 7500 Distributed Control of Multi-Agent System; EE 7560 Optimal Control
and Reinforcement Learning) offered by the Division of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Louisiana State University. Graduate students and undergraduate students will be involved with
project all the time. Opportunities will be created especially for underrepresented students to
work the project. We will organize seminars to introduce the new technology to local community,
including high school teachers and local industrial companies for possible commercialization. |