Unlike humans, ants never have to deal with the annoyance and frustration of traffic thanks to their cooperative tactics, and researchers are now studying how to use their strategies to program self-driving cars to avoid traffic jams.
Indeed, a recent study published in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives has found that Ochetellus ants travel in groups of three to 20, move at nearly constant rates while keeping good distances between one another, and never speed up to pass others.
On the other hand, human drivers don’t typically feel like following such rules during rush hour, Scientific American writes. According to the study co-author, Nicola Pugno, who studies sustainable engineering at the University of Trento in Italy, the problem is human behavior:
“We’re maximizing the interests of individuals, [which] is why, at a given point, you start to have a traffic jam.”
What happens is that the free flow of traffic becomes unstable as the density of vehicles increases on a highway. At 15 cars per mile per lane, one driver braking can trigger congestion, much like water turning from a liquid to a solid form, as Katsuhiro Nishinari, a mathematical physicist at the University of Tokyo, explains it.
Applying ant logic to self-driving cars
That said, future self-driving cars could have more cooperative programming, sharing information with nearby cars to optimize traffic flow by, for instance, prioritizing constant speeds and headways or not passing others on the road – analogous to ants on a trail using scent to interact and coordinate.
And it isn’t just autonomous cars of the future that could learn a thing or two from ants about how to avoid causing a traffic jam – it’s also today’s drivers who could, say, keep their distance and not tailgate, as other researchers (not involved in the new research) have noted.
Meanwhile, autonomous vehicles are well on their way to becoming ubiquitous, with Mercedes Benz cleared for Level 3 autonomous driving, fully unmanned robotaxis and robobuses taking passengers from point A to point B around the world, and advances such as warships and RVs powered by artificial intelligence (AI) already on the map.
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