Abstract: This project is motivated by the possibility of a small number of autonomous vehicles (AVs) that may soon be present on our roads, and how these vehicles will influence the traffic flow. Specifically, driver assist technologies (often referred to as Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) level 1 AVs) are already becoming standard features on many vehicles. However, it is still unclear to what extent driver assist features such as adaptive cruise control (ACC) will influence traffic stability.

Explanation of Demonstration: Traffic waves will arise in the absence of bottlenecks as a result of human driving behavior alone. We conduct an experiment on a ring-road track to demonstrate the ability of a single autonomous vehicle in a flow of human-piloted vehicles to dampen these waves. In this demonstration, we presented a virtual reality video of the experiment.