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Pittsburgh now using artificial intelligence operated traffic lights

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BY KEVIN SAWYER – It seems that the artificial intelligence revolution has reached out to even the mundane and the everyday. The city of Pittsburgh has recently installed traffic lights that will be operated solely by artificial intelligence.

Stephen Smith, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, has developed the concept. He sees the new AI traffic signals as being able to operate in a more fluid way that is able to adapt to the ever changing traffic conditions. Traffic flow constantly changes throughout the day, he explained, yet the current signals are simply machines that are dumb.

He figures that congestion from city traffic can cost upwards of $120 million a year though he doesn’t say how he arrived at such a figure. According to his stats, however, he says that city drivers can spend nearly 40% of their driving time sitting and idling at a traffic light.

His new signals will immediately sense and adapt to changing traffic conditions and allow for a more efficient flow of traffic at different times. The city of Pittsburgh has run experiments with prototypes of Smith’s new signals and have found that people cut their traveling time by 25% and their time sitting and idling by as much as 40%. The government has also estimated that, because of this new efficiency, emissions have been cut by around 20%.

Current traffic light technology gets an update every few years or so but, for the most part, they are programmed via certain time limits for the traffic they are directing. In much longer stretches of suburban roads, the lights are generally set to the speed limit. So, theoretically, if you always drove the speed limit, you would make every light. Easier, however, said than done.

The lights are composed of radar detectors as well as sophisticated algorithms that can sense and detect current traffic conditions and program itself to adapt and to move as many people as possible along in the most efficient way possible at the time. Unlike other systems being tried in other cities, Smith’s system isn’t controlled from a central location of computer banks. Each light operates independently to make it own decisions at specific times according to the traffic conditions they are facing.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay