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Research |
I am an urban computing and quantum information science researcher. My current and past projects are in autonomous vehicles, urban mobility, and quantum information theory.
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Paper In congested traffic, minor disturbances or fluctuations in the velocity of a single vehicle may induce dynamically evolving traffic instabilities such as stop-and-go waves. This work demonstrates in simulation and through extensive experimentation that through intelligent control of a small number (e.g., 1-5%) of autonomous vehicles (AVs) soon to be present in the traffic flow, it is possible to dampen and in some cases completely remove these traffic waves in the entire traffic stream. In the summer of 2016 I designed the autonomous vehicular control called Followerstopper, led by Prof. Jonathan Sprinkle, Prof. Dan Work, Prof. Benjamin Seibold and Prof. Benedetto Piccoli to experimentally demonstrate the ability of a single AV in a stream of 21 other human-piloted vehicles to dampen traffic waves that naturally occur due to human driving behavior. For this experiment, the same circular ring-road setup was selected as in the experiments by Sugiyama, et al. The entire experiment was recorded by a 360-degree panoramic camera at the center of the ring road. Additionally, each vehicle was instrumented with an OBD-II scanner to track vehicle diagnostics and fuel consumption at the microscopic scale. The results of the experiment demonstrated that not only is the AV able to dampen the traffic waves, but also has a significant effect on the performance of all of the vehicles (including the human-piloted vehicles) on the road.
My PhD research covered the problem of mixed autonomy.