New Algorithm May Help Autonomous Vehicles Navigate Narrow, Crowded Streets

Carnegie Mellon University CMU research could help solve last mile delivery challenges - It is a scenario familiar to anyone who has driven down a crowded, narrow street. Parked cars line both sides, and there isn't enough space for vehicles traveling in both directions to pass each other. One has to duck into a gap in the parked cars or slow and pull over as far as possible for the other to squeeze by. Drivers find a way to negotiate this, but not without close calls and frustration. Programming an autonomous vehicle (AV) to do the same - without a human behind the wheel or knowledge of what the other driver might do - presented a unique challenge for researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University Argo AI Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research. "It's the unwritten rules of the road, that's pretty much what we're dealing with here," said Christoph Killing, a former visiting research scholar in the School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute and now part of the Autonomous Aerial Systems Lab at the Technical University of Munich. "It's a difficult bit.