Self-driving cars to get safer?

To help make self-driving vehicles safer and more flawless, the researchers have developed a decentralised algorithm with a collision-free, deadlock-free guarantee. The researchers at Northwestern University in the US, tested the algorithm in a simulation of 1,024 robots and on a swarm of 100 real robots in the laboratory.

The robots reliably, safely and efficiently converged to form a pre-determined shape in less than a minute, according to the study, scheduled to be published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics later this month.

By understanding how to control our swarm robots to form shapes, we can understand how to control fleets of autonomous vehicles as they interact with each other,” said study lead author Michael Rubenstein from Northwestern University.

The advantage of a swarm of small robots — versus one large robot or a swarm with one lead robot — is the lack of a centralised control, which can quickly become a central point of failure. Rubenstein's decentralised algorithm acts as a fail-safe. “If the system is centralised and a robot stops working, then the entire system fails,” Rubenstein said.

“In a decentralised system, there is no leader telling all the other robots what to do. Each robot makes its own decisions. If one robot fails in a swarm, the swarm can still accomplish the task,” Rubenstein added. According to the researcher, still, the robots need to coordinate in order to avoid collisions and deadlock.