On-ramp Shockwave Dissipation

By Eugene Vinitsky
Dec 2018
Relevant Paper

In this work, we demonstrate the ability of shockwave dissipation, previously demonstrated on a ring to scale to an actual highway situation. Vehicles travelling on a highway are perturbed by an aggressive on-ramp merge that the autonomous vehicle needs to dissipate.

As can be seen in the videos, the autonomous vehicle learns to slow its following vehicles to either avoid the perturbation or smooth its effects.

Bottleneck control design
Architecture of the merge control; AVs can only sense the vehicle in front and behind them.
Bottleneck control design
In the limit of a large ring, there is an equivalence between an on-ramp merge and a perturbation in a ring.
Bottleneck control design
Space-time diagram of highway vehicles w/ and w/out the inclusion of AVs.
Bottleneck control design
Control structure of the bottleneck
Bottleneck control design
Control structure of the bottleneck
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