Self-Driving Intelligent Vehicle to Increase Road Safety, Lower Congestion Rates and Decrease Emissions

This study presents the design and development of a vehicle platform with intelligent sensors that has the capabilities to drive independently and cooperatively on roads. An integrated active safety system has been designed to optimize the human senses using ultrasonic infrared sensors and transmitter/receiver modules, to increase the human vision, feel and communication for increased road safety, lower congestion rates, and decrease CO2 emissions. Ultrasonic sensors mounted on the platform, emitted longitudinal 40 kHz waves and received echoes of these sound waves when an object was within its direction. The duration was converted to a distance measurement to detect obstacles as well as using distance measurement threshold values to implement adaptive cruise control. Infrared sensors equipped with an IR LED and a bipolar transistor detected a change in light intensity to identify road lanes. The wireless modules were used for vehicle-to-vehicle communication, where vehicles communicate their current speed and acceleration to each other in order to maintain a constant distance and avoid collisions and traffic congestion. The intelligent vehicle is capable of implementing adaptive cruise control, obstacle avoidance, lane keeping/changing, emergency braking, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Under development in this research is to add a vision system and image processing techniques to detect road lanes, obstacles, and traffic lights or signs and also a fusion between a GPS module, rotary encoder and inertial sensor able to self-drive and see incoming traffic not in sight yet in a city environment.