The question is, will autonomous cars follow the same rules? Is a full stop needed?
Here's an animation I made from Moovly to illustrate how cars could pass through a 4 way intersection without stopping. Sometimes when the signals are broken and flash red, I wish we could do this manually!
I think that even fully autonomous vehicles will be expected to stop at an intersection. Here's why:
"Normal" autonomous use cases involve keeping a safe distance, path planning, reading traffic signs, etc. All of the algorithms providing these can have a reasonable "sensor to actuation" time.
At an intersection, these margins essentially get divided by the number of vehicles entering the intersection potentially stressing the peak performance of the algorithms and impacting safety negatively. Another reason could be to deliberately limit path co-operation rules to control algorithmic complexity.
A safer alternative would be to follow the following rules:
- Stop at an intersection
- Do not proceed if there is a vehicle in the intersection
- Negotiate with all cars at the intersection before proceeding. This step can be designed to handle situations where a mix of human-driven and autonomous vehicles share the road.
BTW, I have renamed my blog to Level4 since I find that I'm exclusively writing about autonomous vehicles and not about mobile and other technologies.
Till next time,
Kuntal.
