GERMANY: In-car computers to avoid red lights

Imagine an intelligent transport system so clever it could tell a motorist how fast to drive in a city to avoid all red lights in a given journey. And then also imagine a system that could advise a driver how to motor at the most constant speed possible, avoiding unnecessary accelerations and braking, saving litres of fuel and engine wear-and-tear to boot. Well, German scientists at the Technical University of Berlin have done exactly that, and they have developed a prototype system that proves the concept is workable.

The team released a paper to the recent 'Internet of Things' conference in Zurich, staged by academics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Switzerland's University of St Gallen, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

In its pages, the Berliners wrote: “Due to the worldwide increasing traffic in combination with the limited capacity of road networks, travelling by car gets more and more frustrating in congested urban areas. Most of the car stops during a route through the city are imposed by junctions and their rules and protocols. Our vision is to drive through a city in a similar way we drive through the countryside. This means that our aim is to drive with a more or less constant speed and with just a few stops.”

Which is just fine and dandy, but how an earth could such an auto utopia be achieved? The technical university researchers say an intelligent transport system advising drivers on optimum speeds to achieve this goal can be developed, based on data culled from GPS-enabled smart-phones placed in vehicles, linked to a configured computer network.

The computer would be filled with data on actual speeds travelled by cars on particular roads, congestion patterns and traffic light timings. Drivers could alert it to their destination and using GPS navigation technology, the computer would know the location of a car and other vehicles using the system. As a result, it could say what speed a motorist should aim for given its location to avoid reds and also prevent excess speeding and braking, taking account of the road layout and congestion.

The paper claimed: “We show that the driver who adopts the velocity advice will drive with much more constant speed while reaching his or her destination location in the same time”. It added that the system's “software collects information about the traffic lights or current traffic flow conditions and gives advice how fast to drive to catch the next green light according to the collected data”.

Of course, many traffic light series are programmes to allow cars to skip through green after green but obstacles like a slowly driving bus or garbage truck can force the driver to reduce his speed or even stop so he loses his connection to the next green traffic light, said the paper.

“There exists a perfect speed to get from one traffic light to the other hitting the green light, but in the majority of cases it is not the usual speed-limit.”

In trials in Berlin, the prototype system recommended a fairly narrow range or urban driving speeds which could give a smooth run through city streets: between 31 and 47 kilometres per hour.

Download the paper