Leading Vehicle State Estimator for Adaptive Cruise Control and Vehicle Tracking

Leading vehicle states are useful and essential elements in adaptive cruise control (ACC) system, collision warning (CW) and collision avoidance (CA) system, and automated highway system (AHS). There are many approaches in ACC using Kalman filter. Mostly only distance to leading vehicle and velocity difference are estimated and used for the above systems. Applications in road vehicle in curved road need to obtain more informations such as yaw angle, steering angle which can be estimated using vision system. Since vision system is not robust to environment change, we used Kalman filter to estimate distance, velocity, yaw angle, and steering angle. Application to active tracking of target vehicle is shown.