Offering predictable journey times is important to the uptake of sustainable road transportation including future public, shared, and on-demand mobility services and to on-time delivery of goods. To achieve such predictability, the ClearWay [1] project at TCD is exploring ‘slot-based driving’ (SBD) as a strategy for active management of roads (especially highways). SBD abstracts traffic as flows of slots with each slot having a specified trajectory. In particular, we are exploring the use of reinforcement learning to have controllers learn appropriate slot-management strategies to improve travel-time reliability. This project will develop a demonstration of SBD on a platoon of mobile robots. The project will involve implementing a SBD controller on the chosen platform with a view to training a controller to coordinate multiple robots to accomplish a task such as avoiding a road blockage.
[1] The ClearWay project is supported by the SFI Frontiers for the Future Programme under award number 21/FFP-A/8957 from 2022 to 2026.