Hackuna Matata

We can send a person to the moon, defeat COVID, attend a hackathon which is thousands of miles away but we can't seem to solve traffic? No worries! We can always try.

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Problem

With every innovation in the automobile industry, traffic has always increased. Traffic often leads to fatal accidents. We neglect the amount of time and energy is spent in doing nothing and stuck somewhere we're not supposed to. Studies have shown, 4.2 billion hours are wasted every year, in the US due to sitting in the congested traffic. What's the use of making cars which can travel over 150 km/h when your driving speed is compared to chariots?

Driving is a selfish activity. When we drive, we look at others and say “You're are in my way!! You are congestion.”

Inspiration

In any given year, 1/10,000 people in the US die in a car accident. This as such seems like a small number but actually, it isn’t when we collectively look upon the population of the country. We were inspired by the motive of utilizing our participation in contributing something to society’s protection using most of our capabilities. Just the thought of being able to come up with a cost-efficient solution to the problem kept us charged-up all along!

Self-driving cars are programmed to stay in the middle and accelerate simultaneously. But everyone cannot afford them. The more self-driving cars at an intersection, the more efficient the intersection gets.

After all, the traffic light is just a tool for drivers on one lane to communicate with drivers on another. Poorly and coarsely. But self-driving cars can communicate amongst each other at the speed of light. Oops! Did we just eliminate traffic lights?! Yes, the best intersection, is no-intersection. Humans can NEVER drive to such precision. (Don't take it as a challenge, please.)

What it does

Human beings are poor drivers with slow reaction time and short attention span. Even if we try to get everyone to press the peddle on 3.. 2.. 1 NOW would be challenging. This discoordination limits how many cars can get through an intersection. In general,

More intersections = More dis-coordination = More traffic

Hackuna Matata brings coordination! The primary task is to maintain definite proportionate distance between the vehicles, which avoids unsafe tail-eating the car in front not only because it makes accidents more likely, but because you as a tail eater can start the traffic snake if the driver ahead brakes.

“Always in the Middle”

This gives you the most time to prevent over-braking but also gives the diver behind you the most time as well. This small behaviour change will bring about an incredible impact on solving the traffic problem.

This coordination can also be linked with the reduction in accidents taking place.

How we built it

We divided the entire building/simulating procedure into two halves

  • Distance Correction Model: we use 2 ultrasonic sensors to compare back and forth distance. A simple solution to better co-ordination is to take help of highly accurate devices present with us. Ultrasonic sensors are precise enough to be used as relative distance indicators to maintain optimum distance between the vehicles.
  • Lane detection model: detects correct lane to drive on to eliminate road accidents taking place due to vehicles crossing each other. This feature is planned to be upgraded to a strong autonomous driving system with other ultrasonics in later phases.

Source code, circuit diagram and CAD diagram is available in GitHub link provided below.

Challenges we ran into

The solution to this problem was quite counter-intuitive. Solving traffic? Let’s increase the number of lanes, and traffic will move faster. Simple, right? Well, that’s not true. Apparently, the number of lanes is proportional to the number of vehicles using it.

Neither cars nor roads, co-ordination is the problem. So the only way to solve our problem is, eliminating the need for humans to make orthodox decisions which could have been easily made by a machine.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Create our Web-app
  • Design the product

What we learned

We learnt the importance of product design in any organization no matter be it a size of Google or a Hachathon, impact set by a good product’s design is impeccable. We also learnt integrating various technologies which were not aware of before, also never worked with other disciplines in such a collaboration. People from different places come together to work as one and create something to contribute to society is beautiful to watch. Soft skills played an important role in managing the team debates, ideas and brainstorming clashes.

What's next for Hackuna Matata

If Hackuna-Matata can achieve two of the major issues faced by us in 24hrs, we are aiming for autonomous driving using LiDAR sensors, better algorithms and hardware devices we could not only reduce human intervention in driving, we also increase the reaction time of vehicles. We also want to achieve inter-vehicular communication using modules we are still spending our research time on. Traffic lights will be obsolete and travel will be fast as ever.

Problem Research References

(yet to be updated)

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