Towards driving autonomously: Autonomous cruise control in urban environments

For automatic driving, vehicles must be able to recognize their environment and take control of the vehicle. The vehicle must perceive relevant objects, which includes other traffic participants as well as infrastructure information, assess the situation and generate appropriate actions. This work is a first step of integrating previous works on environment perception and situation analysis toward automatic driving strategies. We present a method for automatic cruise control of vehicles in urban environments. The longitudinal velocity is influenced by the speed limit, the curvature of the lane, the state of the next traffic light and the most relevant target on the current lane. The necessary acceleration is computed in respect to the information which is estimated by an instrumented vehicle.