news hardware This city is the first in Europe with traffic lights managed by an AI
The city of Bad Hersfeld leaves traffic light control to artificial intelligence. An approach that has a very specific goal for the safety of the population.
Driving on the road, in the city as elsewhere, Traffic lights cannot be overlooked. These indicators are essential to regulate traffic, but also to save lives. However, There are certain situations where traffic lights can pose a problem : This is particularly the case when responders such as ambulances or firefighters need to cross streets as quickly as possible. Dodging a red light and slaloming through road traffic is very dangerous and can also lead to piles of time wasters.
In Germany, a city decided to tackle this problem: This is Bad Hersfeld, which is located in the Hessian Lands. This was announced by the small town with almost 30,000 inhabitants last August validated funding for a “Smart City” project aimed at putting traffic control to artificial intelligence.
Traffic lights managed by an AI
The project aims to use a large amount of real-time traffic data in the city to optimize traffic. Priority is given to optimizing the deployment routes of emergency vehicles when needed: the aim is for them to reach their destination within a maximum of 10 minutes.
Concretely, the system will take the form of a tool accessible in emergency vehicles: it will not only allow the emergency services to know the shortest route immediately, but also enable them to do soActivate an artificial intelligence that can synchronize traffic lights to create “green corridors”.
To ensure that this system does not cause bottlenecks in the city, the associated artificial intelligence can synchronize the lights via a “complex algorithm”
The city of Bad Hersfeld wants to start test this solution with firefighters. It can then be expanded to other emergency medical professionals based on feedback and the effectiveness of the system.
Networked traffic, a future project
If the test that Bad Hersfeld intends to carry out very soon could prove very useful in facilitating the movement of emergency vehicles,“This could be a first step towards artificial intelligence managed road transport in Europe. This vision is shared by many manufacturers of semi-autonomous vehicles, who see it as an addition to the autonomous cars of tomorrow.
Last March, Elon Musk even shared a reflection on Twitter : “Maybe Tesla should develop a device with AI that can be connected to old traffic lights. This would make it possible to easily visualize traffic and optimize the passage of cars.”.
Maybe Tesla should make an AI vision device that plugs into those old traffic lights. It could just look at traffic and automatically maximize throughput.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2022
However, we can point out that this type of technology Already exists : in Pittsburgh, USA, an adaptive traffic control system developed by researchers at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University was gradually introduced from 2012. It equips 50 intersections in the city and has made it possible to reduce waiting times at intersections by up to 40% and travel times in the city by around 25%. The other argument for such a system is ecological, as vehicle emissions would have been reduced by up to 20% thanks to this solution. Enough for everyone to be a winner of the story. So when will there be such a solution in France?
