Max Klingender

Longitudinal and lateral control in automated highway systems: their past, present and future

Due to the increase in road transportation by 35% over the last years in Europe it is essential to find solutions to optimize highway traffic. Therefore, several projects involving automated highway systems were initiated. In these systems, the longitudinal and lateral controls enable (with the help of other components) vehicles to be coupled electronically to form a platoon. Here, just the first vehicle is driven actively and the following vehicles are controlled automatically. Several projects were initiated to develop systems for different environments (i.e. Urban, Motorway). However, the developed techniques still are limited in their application range and e.g. cannot be applied in unstructured environment (i.e. rural or dirty areas). Furthermore, they were not tested for many different heterogeneous vehicles like trucks or passenger cars. This paper presents the past and present of automated highway systems and discusses solutions for future developments, e.g. how existing technologies can be adapted for a wider application range.

Real time detection of the back view of a preceding vehicle for automated heterogeneous platoons in unstructured environment using video

Due to the increase in road transportation several projects concerning automated highway systems were initiated to optimize highway capacity. In the future, the developed techniques should be applicable in unstructured environment (e.g. desert) and adaptable for heterogeneous vehicles. But before, several challenges, i.e. independency of lane markings, have to be overcome. Our solution is to consider the back view of the preceding vehicle as a reference point for the lateral and longitudinal control of the following vehicle. This solution is independent from the environmental structure as well as additional equipment like infrared emitters. Thus, both the detection and tracking process of the back view are needed to provide automated highway systems with the distance and the deviation degree of the preceding vehicle. In this paper the first step, the detection and location of the back view on video streams, is discussed. For a definite detection in a heterogeneous platoon several features of the back view are detected. A method is proposed to run rejection cascades generated by the AdaBoost classifier theory on the video stream. Compared to other methods related to object detection, the proposed method reduces the running time for the detection of the back view to 0.03–0.08 s/frame. Furthermore, the method enables a more accurate detection of the back view.

In-depth safety impact study on longer and/or heavier commercial vehicles in Europe

Maximum weights and dimensions of commercial vehicles within the territory of the European Union are regulated in Directive 96/53/EC. Already today Europe is challenged by an enormous growth of freight transport which such threatens parts of the European transport system with congestion and economic costs that this entails the directive may have reached its limitations. Thus, the Directorate General for Energy and Transport (DG TREN) has recently commissioned a study for European research institutes to analyze the different effects of adapting the maximum weights and dimensions of heavy commercial vehicles for the European Commission. This paper provides an overview of the in-depth safety analysis within this study of these vehicles on European roads. A key finding of the analysis was that permitting longer and/or heavier vehicles in road traffic would not induce an inherent increase of safety risks in general. In addition, the study revealed an economic benefit regarding accident costs by the usage of such commercial vehicles.

A mechanism to improve Stereo Vision Systems in automated heterogeneous platoons

Due to their low price and good quality, Stereo Vision Systems (SVS) are recently considered as a key factor to gather actual information about the object of interest. Today, automated highway systems (AHS) for urban and highway environment were developed without the use of a stereo vision system. In future, the application of AHS should be extended to unstructured environments (e.g. desert) and be adapted to heterogeneous vehicles. In this context, the stereo vision system could enable the platoon to be independent from environmental structure (e.g. lane markings) through its ability to detect, track, locate and recognize heterogeneous vehicles. So far, the need for high accuracy prevents SVS to be applied in automated heterogeneous platoon. In this paper a mechanism towards this is presented, where some behavioral properties have to be satisfied in terms of unstructured environment and heterogeneous platoons. Within a heterogeneous platoon, the back view of a preceding vehicle (BVPV) is considered as a reference point for the lateral and longitudinal control. The key idea of the proposed mechanism is to confirm that the distance of the BVPV can be extracted without depending on the movement of the preceding vehicle. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism has to ensure that features extracted from the back view are suitable to implement successfully the calibration process at around 10m distance. With the proposed SVS mechanism some of behavioral properties have to be satisfied in terms of unstructured environment and AHS. These properties are reliability, performance and robustness. Compared to other methods which use a SVS, the proposed mechanism distinguishes itself through adapting to dynamic environment and extracting the necessary features for the calibration process.

Criteria for Age Based Design of Active Vehicle Safety Systems

In Criteria for age based design of active vehicle safety systems the recent results of the research project Evaluation of active vehicle safety systems and components in regard to their safety impact on elderly car drivers are presented. The project is funded by the Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt). The project aims to answer the question whether Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are able to support elderly drivers to stay mobile and, if so, how they need to be designed to do so. The aim of the project is to retrospectively develop a list of criteria which shall help to develop future age-based designs of driver assistance systems. Therefore an extensive market analysis was carried out at first. The market analysis contained a literature research, a survey with 70 elderly people and expert interviews. In the second phase test drives combined with workload assessments were conducted. 30 elderly and 30 younger drivers participated in the test drives.

Größere Nutzfahrzeuge - länger und schwerer? Chancen und Risiken für Europa

In der Direktive 96/53/EC werden Mase und Gewichte von Nutzfahrzeugen in Europa geregelt. Vor dem Hintergrund eines prognostizierten weiteren Anstiegs des Guterverkehrsaufkommens von bis zu 50% in den EU25- Staaten vom Jahr 2000 bis 2020 beschaftigen sich aktuell Politik, Wirtschaft und Forschung in Europa mit einer moglichen Anpassung dieser Direktive, um den zukunftigen Herausforderungen gewachsen zu sein und den Strasenguterverkehr effizienter zu gestalten.