Introduction and Project Summary

The goal of our project is to simulate and measure the effect of vehicle to vehicle communication – between autonomous vehicles – on road traffic. There has been a lot of research on autonomous vehicles that can sense their surroundings and take action based on their individual sensory input, but we seek to experiment with a setup whereby all the autonomous vehicles cooperate with each other to bring about coordinated traffic and increase throughput. Given our financial limitations, we will only experiment with a contrived setup involving about 6 robotic vehicles and a figure-8 track. We will apply a hitch to the traffic in our contrived setup (such as the halt of one of the moving cars or an obstacle on the road) and compare the throughput between the cooperative and non-cooperative approaches.