Technology has played an important role in modern cars. You’d be hard pressed to find an automobile on the road these days that doesn’t have electronics. And now an experiment has been concluded with the aim of using technology to end traffic jams and improve overall mobility.
Nissan North America, along with the Circles Consortium of researchers from Vanderbilt University, UC Berkeley, Temple University and Rutgers-Camden University, coordinated with the Tennessee Department of Transportation an experiment to increase fuel economy and ease traffic flow.
The five-day open-track testing was conducted Nov. 14-18 on a newly opened, sensor-filled portion of US Interstate 24 called I-24 Motion.
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Using 100 specially equipped Nissan Rogue units, the experiment wanted to test an AI-equipped cruise control system and see how it influences the speed and driving behavior of surrounding cars.
Early findings have shown that a single AI-equipped vehicle can cause a positive ripple effect to help smooth out human-caused traffic jams among 20 surrounding cars. The next few months will be used by the Circles team to analyze data from the five-day experiment on the I-24 Motion “smart highway”.
It should be noted that the I-24 Motion is the only real automotive test environment of its kind in the world. It stretches four miles just southeast of downtown Nashville, equipped with 300 4K digital sensors capable of recording 260 million miles of data per year.
On November 16 alone, the system recorded a total of 143,010 miles traveled and 3,780 hours of driving.
“The I-24 Motion system, combined with the vehicle energy models developed as part of the Circles project, provided an estimate of the fuel consumption of the entire traffic flow during these hours. The concept we hope to demonstrate is that by leveraging this new traffic system to collect data and estimate traffic and apply artificial intelligence technology to existing cruise control systems, we can reduce traffic congestion and improve fuel economy,” the Circles team said in a joint statement.
The I-24 Motion is a permanent infrastructure, which means that the testbed will always be available to researchers. Toyota North America and General Motors also supported the five-day experiment in November, providing two additional test units: Toyota RAV4 and Cadillac XT5.
