Integrating Odometry and Inter-vehicular Communication for Adaptive Cruise Control with Target Detection Loss

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems utilize distance sensors and control algorithms to enable a vehicle to follow its preceding vehicle with desired headways. There are situations when distance sensors may lose the target, i.e., the preceding vehicle, when unfavorable weather conditions result in low reflectance or the preceding vehicle escapes the sensor’s angle of view on curvy roads. In these situations, a common strategy is to suppress acceleration and maintain current speed (Cruise Control) until the sensor detects the preceding vehicle again. In this paper, we propose a new solution which integrates odometry and inter-vehicular communication to enable vehicle following for the period of target detection loss. With intervehicular communication, a following vehicle can obtain the odometry data of its preceding vehicle to compute the intervehicle distance. This work focuses on the design of an ACC system that can enable vehicle following during short-term target detection loss. The feasibility of the system design is validated through mobile robot experiments. Autonomous lane keeping capability is developed such that the mobile robots move according to the center of the lane. The robot following experiment results show that with accurate odometry and lane centering, the proposed system design can maintain desired headway following.