Learning to Control and Coordinate Mixed Traffic Through Robot Vehicles at Complex and Unsignalized Intersections

Intersections are essential road infrastructures for traffic in modern metropolises. However, they can also be the bottleneck of traffic flows as a result of traffic incidents or the absence of traffic coordination mechanisms such as traffic lights. Recently, various control and coordination mechanisms that are beyond traditional control methods have been proposed to improve the efficiency of intersection traffic. Amongst these methods, the control of foreseeable mixed traffic that consists of human-driven vehicles (HVs) and robot vehicles (RVs) has emerged. In this project, we propose a decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning approach for the control and coordination of mixed traffic at real-world, complex intersections--a topic that has not been previously explored. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of our approach. In particular, we show that using 5% RVs, we can prevent congestion formation inside a complex intersection under the actual traffic demand of 700 vehicles per hour. In contrast, without RVs, congestion starts to develop when the traffic demand reaches as low as 200 vehicles per hour. When there exist more than 60% RVs in traffic, our method starts to achieve comparable or even better performance to traffic signals on the average waiting time of all vehicles at the intersection. Our method is also robust against both blackout events and sudden RV percentage drops, and enjoys excellent generalizablility, which is illustrated by its successful deployment in two unseen intersections.