A new approach to lane guidance systems

This paper presents a new automotive safety function called emergency lane assist (ELA). ELA combines conventional lane guidance systems with a threat assessment module that tries to activate and deactivate the lane guidance interventions according to the actual risk level of lane departure. The goal is to only prevent dangerous lane departure maneuvers. Such a threat assessment algorithm is dependent on detailed information about the vehicle surroundings, i.e., positions and motion of other vehicles, but also information about road and lane geometry is used and the performance is improved by introducing a nonlinear model which uses a road aligned, curved coordinate system. The ELA decision algorithm has been tested in a demonstrator and it successfully distinguishes between dangerous and safe lane changes on a small set of test scenarios. It is also able to take control of the vehicle and put it in a safe position in the original lane.