Self-organising Wide area monitoring systems for Autonomous pods, enabling Real-time Marshalling

Autonomous, or self-driving, vehicles have been hard to miss in the news recently, whether this be Tesla's partially automated 'Auto Pilot' feature, or the fully driverless 'Pods' that arrived on the streets of Milton Keynes in October 2016. As the technology becomes more familiar, people are becoming increasingly confident that individual vehicles will be able to drive and navigate themselves on roads and around people. But a single self-driving car is of limited value, it needs to work as part of an existing transport system – therefore conversations are now moving towards ‘how will they actually work in a city network’. Currently one Pod can move one person (maybe two if sharing), but it needs a trained safety driver to be in the vehicle, plus traffic cameras to monitor its every move and to make sure it does what is expected. This is expensive, so to make autonomous urban transport more efficient - while maintaining safety - we need to share this supervision between the Pods and external systems (cameras and humans). We aim to achieve this by using Swarm Intelligence (what bees or ants do when part of a colony) to enable real-time, collaborative supervision of pods – meaning individual Pods are locally supervised, not only by cameras or humans, but by neighbouring Pods in the Swarm colony.