US To Drive 3,000 Wi-Fi Linked Vehicles In Massive Crash Avoidance Trial

coondoggie writes "The U.S. Department of Transportation said it will run a massive road test of cars, trucks and buses linked together via WiFi equipment in what the agency says will be the largest test of automated crash avoidance technology to date. The test will be conducted by the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), and feature mostly volunteer participants whose vehicles have been outfitted with vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication devices."

Comments

Ann Arbor drivers thinking about dissertations

[ewg]

Ann Arbor is a good place to start, its drivers are too preoccupied with their dissertations to watch the road...

Re:Ann Arbor drivers thinking about dissertations

[Naatach]

And with the forward facing radar, the bastard computers can tailgate you even worse than Ann Arbor drivers!

Re:Ann Arbor drivers thinking about dissertations

[History's Coming To]

Sadly, I'm off on a bit of an essay here. If you're the tl;dr type then you do not have my permission to read further and if you do you are expected to burn all your Bieber albums, it's a rite of passage you'll thank me for later.

Slashdot "nigger" trolls aren't necessarily racist. OK, yes, they use that word a lot, but that's simply evolution, they've learned (collectively, not individually) that using the N word is likely to get a reaction, and this promotes further troll activity of this nature. Responding to the N-trolls is akin to not completing your course of antibiotics, you just ensure more, worse and faster.

With this in mind, can I suggest that the Slashdot community, those of us with the balls to put names to our comments and ACs with intelligent arguments alike, all act as one.

From now on we must all solemnly pledge to only respond to the trolls when they come up with something tyruly imaginative, creative and interesting. For example, if they can whip up a (truly extraterrestrial) xenephobia argument then I for one will be happy to argue with them, I've read Ender's Game and everything.

3000 WiFi radios at once ?

[psergiu]

3000 WiFi radios emiting together on how many channels and using what bandwidth ? Even if they drop to 1Mbps and use all 11 US 802.11 2.4Ghz channels, the collisions caused by ~270 devices on the same channell will make that network unuseable.

What about the trolls with a WiFi jammer (like a microwave over with a screwdriver jammed in the door safety switch) ? Turn-it on and watch the pile-ups.

Or will they use all channels in the 802.11n 5Ghz spectrum ?

Re:3000 WiFi radios at once ?

[Naatach]

..the collisions caused by ~270 devices on the same channell will make that network unuseable.

With that many collisions, that would make the road pretty much unusable too.

Re:3000 WiFi radios at once ?

[Sarten-X]

Because of course the engineers building an automated network aren't aware enough to think about what the car should do if it loses connections to other cars...

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the 3000 radios aren't all transmitting to each other. Rather, each one would lower its power to broadcast only to its immediate area, so other cars can avoid it. A jammer would force cars nearby to switch to backup systems, and other vehicles could increase their own transmission power to compensate for the noise.

Also note that though the article uses the term "WiFi", these are likely not standard 802.11 devices. Rather, they are in the 5.9 GHz band, with 75MHz bandwidth.

Re:3000 WiFi radios at once ?

[Baloroth]

These aren't driverless cars. The crash-avoidance system is a supplement to help drivers avoid collision (giving them warnings of incoming cars at intersections, alerts of possible rear end collisions, stuff like that), rather than a replacement for the drivers. In other words, if the system goes down you simply don't get the benefits, which is exactly what we have now anyways.

Re:3000 WiFi radios at once ?

[bob8766]

In other news, Rush hour traffic is at a complete standstill on I-94 in both directions due to a "Software Glitch" with a traffic monitoring hub. The internet hactivist group "Anonymous" has claimed responsibility for the glitch.

Re:3000 WiFi radios at once ?

[Idbar]

Also, nobody said they will all transmit at once... that would cause not just a massive packet crash, but likely the car crash as well if the system is not properly designed.

But as you said, engineers probably have thought of what happens if data reliability turns to zero, but also implement some of the Ad-hoc/Mesh networking routing techniques to properly propagate sufficient data (it's not like all the 3000 vehicles will start transmitting HD video to each other, right?). To the GP, this experiment will probably behave more like a sensor network, rather than a P2P torrent network.

Re:3000 WiFi radios at once ?

[RicktheBrick]

Why can't we control intersections this way? Every car going through a intersection would be given a certain speed to avoid being in the intersection at the same time as another car. If we could get rid of traffic lights, stop signs and yield signs, I am sure we could increase gas mileage enough to pay for the system. I would also like to see every car being mandated that it has both a gps system and cruise control. If they were integrated with the accelerating pedal so that no car would be able to speed, I would think there would be less accidents.

mostly volunteer?

[a2wflc]

Will they at least tell the non-volunteers that their vehicle has been modified? I hope medical scientists don't pick up this new way of increasing the size of your test group.

Re:Sounds like a place for a jammer.

[Githaron]

I assume the wireless communication is simply for efficient coordination between the vehicles. The vehicles would be able to function without the wireless communication but traffic flow would not be as efficient. The vehicles would simply have a fail safe that if the network goes down. The gap between cars is increased and speed is decreased since the uncertainty of the situation is increased.

I can't wait

[maroberts]

...for the video of the resulting Blues Brothers style pile-up.

link to project page

[Trepidity]

Here is the DOT project page on the experiment, which includes a nice FAQ, and a description of the purpose.

This particular 3,000-vehicle experiment, fwiw, is not intended to test the crash-avoidance technology in a live trial, but rather to collect a data set. The indicators aren't going to be displayed to the drivers on a HUD or anything, but just recorded for analysis, along with vehicle position/telemetry.

surely...

[zmollusc]

...they are using the wrong networking topology? Token ring is the way to go if you don't want collisions .

They missed something

[na1led]

They programmed all the cars to avoid hitting each other, but forgot to tell the cars to also avoid hitting everything else.