Steering-assist control system on curved road using car-to-car communication

Several driver-assist systems have been developed to enhance driver comfort, such as Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Lane-Keeping Assist System (LKAS). Drivers must steer the vehicle even with the current ACC. LKAS manages the vehicle position within the lane in when the road curvature is not very large. The ability of such systems strongly depends on the recognition technology applied to the road environment. A sensor fusion method is one option to increase robustness of environmental recognition. The present study seeks to develop a road-information acquisition method based on a car-mounted sensor and a car-to-car communication system and to explore its application to an automatic steering-control system. In this paper, we assume that there is a lead vehicle in front of the host vehicle within the detection range of the car-mounted sensor and it can detect its relative position. First, a virtual road boundary estimation method is proposed based on measurement of the relative position of the lead vehicle and the lead vehicle status obtained by the car-to-car communication method. A steering-assist control method is then proposed using the estimated virtual road boundary information. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed steering-assist control method is demonstrated by simulation results.