Canonical instabilities of autonomous vehicle systems
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Autonomous Systems, Real-Time and Embedded Systems, Robotics, Theory and Formal Methods
- Keywords
- control theory, driving experience, groupoid, information theory, turbulence, vehicle density
- Copyright
- © 2016 Wallace
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Canonical instabilities of autonomous vehicle systems. PeerJ PrePrints 4:e1714v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1714v1
Abstract
Formal argument suggests that command, communication and control systems can remain stable in the sense of the Data Rate Theorem that mandates the minimum rate of control information required to stabilize inherently unstable 'plants', but may nonetheless, under fog-of-war demands, collapse into dysfunctional modes at variance with their fundamental mission. We apply the theory to autonomous ground vehicles under intelligent traffic control in which swarms of interacting, self-driving devices are inherently unstable as a consequence of the basic irregularity of the road network. It appears that such 'V2V/V2I' systems will experience large-scale failures analogous to the vast propagating fronts of power network blackouts, and possibly less benign, but more subtle patterns of `psychopathology' at various scales.
Author Comment
A version of this material will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming book titled 'Information Theory Models of Instabilities in Critical Systems'.