Design, tuning, and evaluation of a full-range adaptive cruise control system with collision avoidance

This paper describes the design, tuning, and evaluation of a full-range adaptive cruise control (ACC) system with collision avoidance (CA). The control scheme is designed to improve drivers’ comfort during normal, safe-driving situations and to completely avoid rear-end collision in vehicle-following situations. Driving situations are divided into safe, warning, and dangerous modes. Three different control strategies have been proposed, depending on the driving situation. The driving situations are determined using a non-dimensional warning index and the time-to-collision (TTC). The control parameters of the proposed ACC/CA system are tuned by a confusion-matrix method using manual-driving data in no-crashing driving situations. The vehicle-following characteristics of the subject vehicle were compared to real-world, manual-driving data. Finally, the ACC/CA system was also implemented in a real vehicle and tested in both safe-traffic and severe-braking situations. It is shown that the proposed control strategy can provide natural following performance that is similar to human manual-driving in both high-speed driving and low-speed stop-and-go situations. Furthermore, it can prevent the vehicle-to-vehicle distance from dropping to an unsafe level in a variety of driving conditions.