Personal Rapid Transportation in Cities

The world's first on-road demonstration of co-operative driving solutions by autonomous road vehicles capable of transporting human passengers brings with it high hopes of driverless cities of the future. Griffith University's Intelligent Control Systems Laboratory (ICSL) has introduced the "cooperative autonomous driving/intelligent vehicle" concept. As approached by the ICSL, the ubiquitous and inefficiently utilised personal automobile would be supplanted by a fleet of intelligent autonomous agents (embodied as driverless vehicles) kept in constant use by a much larger number of users to form a personal rapid transport network. These agents coexist with "dumb" vehicles and co-operate with each other to optimise traffic flows as they pass. Initially this will be on a small scale, short trips at low speed in an urban environment or on private grounds, however, this method of transportation will propagate out, interconnecting suburbs and cities to form a giant web. While still distant, this vision has just taken a great leap forward with the successful demonstration of a number of cooperative autonomous driving manoeuvres.