1 research outputs found
Flow: A Modular Learning Framework for Autonomy in Traffic
The rapid development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) holds vast potential for
transportation systems through improved safety, efficiency, and access to
mobility. However, due to numerous technical, political, and human factors
challenges, new methodologies are needed to design vehicles and transportation
systems for these positive outcomes. This article tackles technical challenges
arising from the partial adoption of autonomy: partial control, partial
observation, complex multi-vehicle interactions, and the sheer variety of
traffic settings represented by real-world networks. The article presents a
modular learning framework which leverages deep Reinforcement Learning methods
to address complex traffic dynamics. Modules are composed to capture common
traffic phenomena (traffic jams, lane changing, intersections). Learned control
laws are found to exceed human driving performance by at least 40% with only
5-10% adoption of AVs. In partially-observed single-lane traffic, a small
neural network control law can eliminate stop-and-go traffic -- surpassing all
known model-based controllers, achieving near-optimal performance, and
generalizing to out-of-distribution traffic densities.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures; new experiments and analysi