Ad-hoc adaptive cruise control algorithm
Balázs Mezny, Péter Laborczi, Géza Gordos
Nowadays, nearly all car manufacturers can build a cruise control system (tempomat) in their cars if the customer demands. Usually, these systems can maintain a certain speed, set by the driver of the vehicle. The tempomat system can be extended with a distance measurement sensor in some top-end luxury cars, to measure the distance of objects in front of the car (this can be another car or some kind of obstacle). By using these systems, a certain following distance can be set, and the tempomat tries to maintain it by using small amounts of acceleration or breaking according to the data provided by the sensor.
These adaptive cruise control systems are expensive, and the detection range and field of view of the sensors are limited. In this paper, we present an adaptive cruise control system, which sets the speed of the vehicle according to messages distributed over an ad-hoc wireless network. The wireless communication eliminates the problems caused by bad visibility or being out of line of sight. The distributed messages contain the exact position, speed and direction of the sender vehicle. The described algorithm determines also the vehicle to be followed, when the driver turns on the tempomat.