Aerial view of street intersection with lights, crosswalks and bike paths

Featured project

Crossroads: Autonomous Intersection Management

Sponsors

Partially funded by National Science Foundation grants:

  • CCF 1055094 (CAREER)
  • CNS 1525855
  • NIST 60NANB16D305
  • NIST 60NANB15D322

Challenge

The introduction and adoption of autonomous vehicles will require intelligent autonomous intersection management. Intersection management includes maintaining a safety buffer around the vehicle while factoring variable network and computational time delays. Modeling these network and computational delays can degrade the throughput of the intersection even when processed by a state-of-the-art intersection manager.

Summary

To combat these limitations, ASU researchers have developed Crossroads, a time-sensitive method to program the interface of a vehicle and intersection that does not require an additional buffer to account for network and computational delays.

Using a small-scale intersection model with radio control cars, the Crossroads approach demonstrated a reduction in average vehicle wait time at a single-lane intersection of 24 percent. Crossroads obviates the need for large buffers to accommodate network and computational delays.

Simulated Intersection
A small-scale (“1/10 scale”) model of an intersection with TRAXXAS radio control cars

Results

Through extensive MATLAB simulations, Crossroads has shown increased throughput compared to existing approaches: 1.62X higher throughput (on average) than Velocity Transaction Intersection Management (VT-IM) with extra safety buffers, and 1.36X higher throughput (on average) than autonomous intersection management (AIM).

chart
Crossroads performance compared to AIM and VT-IM

For more information, including publication in the 54th-annual Design Automation Conference (DAC), see https://labs.engineering.asu.edu/mps-lab/.

ASU leads