Between November 14 and 18, two CERMICS researchers participated in the world’s largest collaborative autonomous vehicle experiment on the highway during rush hour. A hundred connected autonomous vehicles were deployed on the highway between 6am and 10am with control algorithms aiming to reduce traffic jams and in particular stop-and-go waves.
The goal is to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions of the whole traffic by acting only on a small proportion of connected vehicles. The vehicles were looped on a 6km stretch of I-24 south of Nashville, Tennessee.
This is the culmination of a three-year project led by the CIRCLES consortium, which includes Amaury Hayat, a researcher at CERMICS, and Nathan Lichtlé, a PhD student at CERMICS and ITS Berkeley. Amaury Hayat and Nathan Lichtlé co-designed the control algorithms used in this experiment. These algorithms use either classical mathematical techniques or AI models obtained by reinforcement learning.
See also the press release from Ecole des Ponts and this article from France Info.