At a traffic signal, vehicles traditionally have to come to a stop to allow other vehicles to pass. This creates traffic buildup and unnecessarily increases carbon emissions. We wanted to find a way to avoid this... especially in a world that is beginning to turn towards automation for ease of several tasks in our daily lives. Our program simulates the interactions between automated cars at an intersection with no lights/signals while eliminating collisions. The program dynamically adjusts the velocity and acceleration of cars in-time so that cars seamlessly and realistically can enter and exit the intersection.
github.com/akashpamal/HackTJ7-5
We built this by using Pygame for our graphics which clearly and realistically displays a 4-lane intersection with cars of various sizes. Our largest challenge was deciding how to systematically create an algorithm that would account for all cases of interactions between cars since there are lots of possibilities when there are multiple pieces interacting in a single simulation such as this.
We're proud of how realistic our simulation was and how applicable it could be to a real situation. We are also proud of our work in working with the several moving pieces and having them all "communicate" with each other in a clean and organized way. We plan to take this further to account for turns and to account for possible errors that could occur as a result of real-life situations.
Created by Akash Pamal, Jack Blair, and Rahel Selemon HackTJ 2020 12/13/20 MIT License