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Introduction
In recent years, with the rapid growth of vehicles’ number in the world, traffic jam is getting more and more serious and traffic accident rate continues to rise in every major city of the world that the residents’ travel environment starts to deteriorate and the life safety is under threat seriously. How to solve the problems on improving the driving safety and reducing traffic accident has already became a problem needing urgent resolution.
It is generally known that the adaptive cruise control (ACC) system as a safety assistant driving system can automatically adjust the cruise vehicle’s speed to keep a safe distance from the vehicle ahead through obtaining the lidar’s or radar’s information. Tsai et al.1 have presented a fuzzy longitudinal control system with car-following speed ranging from 0 to 120 km/h to realize the main functions of both ACC and stop & go control. Sivaji and Sailaja2 have proposed ACC for stop & go maneuvers of an intelligent vehicle using hybrid proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller. Pei et al.3 have proposed a layered algorithm for ACC based on throttle/brakes combined control. Chen et al.4 present an intelligent control strategy of automobile cruise based on the throttle or braking pedal combined control adopting fuzzy control theory. Although the ACC system can follow the preceding target car to prevent rear-end collisions and improve the citizens’ travel environment to some extent, it does still exist the collision possibilities with the vehicle in front. For example, it doesn’t anticipate the vehicles in adjacent lane abruptly cutting to the cruise vehicle’ lane. Especially, the potential danger of the rear-end incident will increase greatly in the city road condition because there exists a number of curve roads, and it is much dense than other driving environment, and the frequent changing-lane behavior always happens. It is very critical for the control strategy to judge the only key target among the found multi-object, especially on the curve road because the ACC system is unable to recognize precisely the key target vehicle ahead from the confusion vehicles, or the following target is thoroughly lost. Moon et al.5 have presented a target selection strategy for ACC in multiple vehicle traffic situations. Chen6 has proposed a target selection algorithm of...