Essay On Autonomous Vehicles

In 2011 almost 30,000 people lost their lives in car accidents in the United States. Although the numbers are decreasing each year, it is still more than 82 people per day. That number is equal to a large airplane crashing every three days, nevertheless people heavily use and rely on cars everyday. Furthermore, traditional traffic light control causes delays, congestion, unnecessary fuel costs and pollution.

Advances in technology made within the last twenty years have impacted our lives in numerous ways. These advances have been made in all aspects of our lives including the way we transport. Having an efficient mean of transportation is essential to human devel-opment, meaning that an intelligent transportation system is key for progress. One acceler-ating aspect of ITS is the development of autonomous vehicles. Drivers are the reason for most crashes, for instance due to drowsiness, driving under the influence or inattentive-ness. Intelligent vehicles assist drivers in ordinary driving situations through warnings (e.g. lane departure warning) or undertaking certain tasks (e.g. cruise control). Autonomous ve-hicles go one step further by reducing human influence to a minimum and thus increasing the security of driving. Autonomous vehicles are going to be able to transport humans in a safer and more efficient manner. In order to accomplish this efficient autonomous behavior, vehicles will have to communicate with other vehicles as well is the infrastructure surround-ing them. To be able to perform this, autonomous vehicles will have to move through the roads in platoons. It has been investigated that when a platoon of vehicles exists, traffic congestion considerably reduces. Therefore communication within the vehicles in the pla...

... middle of paper ...

...ehicle communication. It identifies the bus itinerary routes to determine areas with high connectivity for transmission. It uses the signals from different cars and buses to determine traffic conditions in different streets in order to calculate an-chor routing paths. It also gives weights to street depending on their capacity. With this in-formation this protocol can help visualize the traffic situation around the city.

[BLU 03] (Diab, 328) is clustering algorithm. Cluster selection is based on car mobili-ty, driver behavior, and distance between cars. This protocol is designed in a way that im-proves scalability.

[LOC 03] (Diab, 328) is a reactive routing protocol, which means that it shows the path that is selected by the driver. Using the city map, this protocol is based on geograph-ical location. This protocol fits under the category of routing using topology.