An Embedded Real-Time Lane-Keeper for Automatic Vehicle Driving

Automatic vehicle driving involves several issues, such as the capability to follow the road and keep the right lane, to maintain the distance between vehicles, to regulate vehiclepsilas speed, to find the shortest route to a destination. In this paper a real-time automatic lane-keeper is proposed. The main features of the system are the lane markers location process as well as the computation of the vehiclepsilas steering lock. The above techniques require high elaboration speed to execute, check and complete an operation before a prearranged time. Clearly if system processing exceeds the deadline, the whole operation became meaningless or, in the meantime, the vehicle can reach a critical condition. The proposed system has been prototyped using the Celoxica RC203 board, equipped with a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA, for real-time processing of real motorway scenes coming from aCCD camera on a moving vehicle. The required processing time is 25,521 ms per frame, so that the system could process 39 frames/sec. Vehiclepsilas steering lock is computed with an average error of plusmn 2.5deg.