Self-organising Wide area monitoring systems for Autonomous pods, enabling Real-time Marshalling

最近的新闻里总是少不了自动驾驶汽车，无论是特斯拉部分自动化的“自动驾驶”功能，还是2016年10月出现在米尔顿凯恩斯街头的完全无人驾驶的“pod”。随着这项技术变得越来越熟悉，人们越来越相信，个人车辆将能够在道路上和人们周围自动驾驶和导航。但是一辆自动驾驶汽车的价值是有限的，它需要作为现有交通系统的一部分来工作，因此现在的讨论转向了“它们如何在城市网络中实际工作”。目前，一辆Pod可以搭载一个人（如果共享的话，可能会搭载两个人），但它需要一名训练有素的安全驾驶员在车内，再加上交通摄像头来监控它的一举一动，并确保它按照预期行事。这是昂贵的，所以为了使自动城市交通更高效，同时保持安全，我们需要在pod和外部系统（摄像头和人类）之间共享这种监督。我们的目标是通过使用群体智能（蜜蜂或蚂蚁作为群体的一部分时所做的事情）来实现对豆荚的实时协作监督，这意味着单个豆荚在本地受到监督，不仅由摄像机或人类监督，而且由群殖民地中相邻的豆荚监督。

Autonomous, or self-driving, vehicles have been hard to miss in the news recently, whether this be Tesla's partially automated 'Auto Pilot' feature, or the fully driverless 'Pods' that arrived on the streets of Milton Keynes in October 2016. As the technology becomes more familiar, people are becoming increasingly confident that individual vehicles will be able to drive and navigate themselves on roads and around people. But a single self-driving car is of limited value, it needs to work as part of an existing transport system – therefore conversations are now moving towards ‘how will they actually work in a city network’. Currently one Pod can move one person (maybe two if sharing), but it needs a trained safety driver to be in the vehicle, plus traffic cameras to monitor its every move and to make sure it does what is expected. This is expensive, so to make autonomous urban transport more efficient - while maintaining safety - we need to share this supervision between the Pods and external systems (cameras and humans). We aim to achieve this by using Swarm Intelligence (what bees or ants do when part of a colony) to enable real-time, collaborative supervision of pods – meaning individual Pods are locally supervised, not only by cameras or humans, but by neighbouring Pods in the Swarm colony.