The authors are with the Industrial Computer Science Department,
Instituto de Automática Industrial (CSIC), 28500 Madrid, Spain
The goal that a car be driven autonomously is far in
the future and probably unreachable, but as a first step in that
direction, adaptive cruise control (ACC) and Stop&Go maneuver
systems are being developed. These kind of controllers adapt the
speed of a car to that of the preceding one (ACC) and get the car
to stop if the lead car stops. This paper presents one such system
and related experiments performed on a real road with real cars.
The driving system gets its input via an RTK DGPS device and
communicates its positions to one another via a wireless local area
network link. It outputs signals controlling the pressure on the
throttle and brake pedals. The control system is based on fuzzy
logic, which is considered best to deal with processes as complex
as driving. Two mass produced Citroën Berlingo electric vans
have been instrumented, providing them with computer controlled
actuators over the brake and the throttle to achieve human-like
driving. The results of the experiments show that the behavior of
the vehicles is very close to human and that they adapt to driving
incidences, increasing the safety of the driving and permitting
cooperation with manually driven cars.
This
work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Education under Grant
ISAAC CICYT DPI2002-04064-C05-02, by the Spanish Ministry of Public
Works under Grant COPOS BOE 280 22/11/2002, and by the Res. 22778,
Citroën España S.A. under Contract “Adquirir nuevos conocimientos sobre la
introducción de las tecnologías de la información en el mundo del automóvil
y para difundirlos en los ámbitos científicos, empresariales y comerciales
(AUTOPIA),” and by Cybecars-2 Project UE-STREP 28062, 6th Framework
Programme, 2006.
Peer reviewed