Some Motorists Stuck More than Five Hours
Automobile traffic throughout much of Atlanta was thrown into turmoil Sunday afternoon after gangs of robotic traffic cones and robotic traffic barrels began attacking each other at widely dispersed locations.
Some of the robots, which are used on highway construction projects to guide traffic, also attacked cars. In at least three cases, the robots chased motorists who had stepped out of their cars during the gridlock.
“It was terrible, like street gangs on a rampage,” said Emily Kronte of suburban Scottdale. “Some of the barrels acted like they were berserk. I saw one ram a pickup half a dozen times before it went lumbering off chasing a cone.”
Kronte said she and her husband and three children spent four hours stuck in traffic near the intersection of I-85 and I-285, a famed congestion point in Atlanta’s northern suburbs.
Traffic engineers and computer experts were still trying late Sunday to understand why the quick and more maneuverable robot cones attacked the larger but much slower traffic barrel robots. They said they particularly want to understand who or what coordinated the simultaneous attacks at nine highway construction projects in the metropolitan Atlanta area.
“There’s was definitely a conspiracy of some sort among the robots and their controlling computers,” said Hanson Hodges, director of robotics for the Georgia Department of Transportation. “We also want to know if the robots planned this themselves or if they had some human help, maybe from a Yankee at Harvard or some place up north. ”
The traffic jam, described as the worst in the city’s history, lasted more than five hours and affected an estimated 100,000 motorists. During the tie up, four women gave birth and 11 people were shot or beaten as a result of road rage confrontations. None of the shootings were life threatening, police said.
Engineers said three robot cones and two robot barrels also were shot, one fatally.
Atlanta gained considerable notoriety 18 months ago when the 2,500 robot cones and 1,500 robot barrels were deployed to guide traffic. They are part of a $150 million federally-funded research project carried out by Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Each robot has a computer that is programmed for daily tasks at a site, usually a highway construction project. The robots, which can move themselves into place, reduce the number of humans who must position cones and barrels, sometimes at considerable danger when they work close to fast-moving streams of traffic.
The robots are also tied together by a network administered by a bank of central computers, some of which are located in Massachusetts and others on the Georgia Tech campus.
Engineers said that while each robot can communicate independently with nearby robots about its daily chores, any data exchanges more complex than that must be routed through the central computers.
“We’re looking into the extent that robots at one construction site might have used the central computers to engage in forbidden discussions with robots at another site,” said Dr. Chaksur Romananthra, a project scientist at M.I.T. “The central computer is supposed to monitor all talk and step in when inappropriate information is being exchanged. We’re always mindful of the possibility of a robot revolt of some sort.”
The system was deliberately designed so that robots at one construction site would be ignorant of brother and sister robots at other sites. But within weeks of the system’s inauguration, engineers discovered that all the robots not only knew about one another, but had begun to discuss their work conditions and organize committees.
Dr. Romananthra said logs generated by the central computers were being studied to determine how the cones made plans to attack the barrels and whether the central computers looked the other way when they should have taken action.
“There has been considerable tension between the cones and the barrels since the beginning of the project, mostly because the cones feel superior to the barrels,” Dr. Romananthra said. “We thought we had worked out procedures that both cones and barrels were comfortable with. Obviously, there are still unresolved issues.”
Hodges said the Georgia Department of Transportation plans a full-scale investigation. “We’ll get to the bottom of this and justice will be done,” he said.