Browse Topic: Driving control assistance
Despite remarkable advances in vehicle technology - enhancing comfort, safety, and automation – productivity of transportation over the road continues to decline. Stop-and-go driving remains one of the most persistent inefficiencies in modern mobility systems, leading to greater travel delays, energy waste, emissions, and accident risk. As vehicle volumes rise, these effects compound into systemic challenges, including driver frustration, unstable flow dynamics, and elevated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To address these issues, an extensive data-driven evaluation was performed characterizing the underlying causes of traffic instability and uncovering hidden behavioral parameters influencing traffic flow. This research led to the identification of a previously unrecognized metric - the Driver Comfort Index (DCI) - which quantifies an inter-vehicle spacing behavior that reflects intrinsic human driving behavior. Building on this discovery, mixed traffic is explored to identify its phenomena, where human-driven and machine-controlled vehicles coexist and share the road. It appears that adaptive cruise control (ACC) and connected autonomous vehicles (CAV) are controlled by a non-intrinsic parameter so that traffic mix suffers from a mismatch of vehicle dynamics. This mismatch is explored, and it is proposed to harmonize traffic dynamics by adopting the natural DCI parameter as the single control mechanism. Analytical studies demonstrate that DCI-based traffic flow orchestration, applied integrally to human- and machine-controlled vehicles, enhances traffic flow stability, mitigates stop-and-go oscillations, and significantly improves network efficiency, safety, and environmental performance.
ADAS sensor fusion can provide improved and required safety technologies by rethinking the best strategy for allowing a car to sense the world. For more than a decade, vehicle safety has advanced as ADAS have become more capable. Features once considered premium, such as automatic emergency braking, forward-collision warning, blind-spot detection and lane-keeping assist, are increasingly common across new vehicles. The impact is significant, with current ADAS technologies expected to prevent 27 million collisions and 250,000 deaths over the next quarter-century. Despite this progress, the sensing technologies powering these systems are still far from their full potential. Regulatory expectations are rising, NCAP performance thresholds are tightening, compute architectures are centralizing, and software-defined vehicle initiatives demand a level of sensing reliability and adaptability that traditional, siloed ADAS designs were never built for.
As vehicles are becoming more complex, maintaining the effectiveness of safety critical systems like adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, electronic breaking and airbag deployment extends far beyond the initial design and manufacturing. In the automotive industry these safety systems must perform reliably over the years under varying environmental conditions. This paper examines the critical role of periodic maintenance in sustaining the long-term safety and functional integrity of these systems throughout the lifecycle. As per the latest data from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), in 2022, India reported a total of 4.61 lakh road accidents, resulting in 1.68 lakh fatalities and 4.43 lakh injuries. The number of fatalities could have been reduced by the intervention of periodic services and monitoring the health of safety critical systems. While periodic maintenance has contributed to long term safety of the vehicles, there are a lot of vehicles on the road which are not serviced regularly. This paper aims to fill this critical gap by proposing a system where the government agencies actively collect and monitor vehicle maintenance data and diagnostics data ensuring that all vehicles on the road undergo mandatory periodic servicing to uphold the integrity of safety-critical systems. This paper concludes by proposing a centralized framework for data sharing and proactive monitoring to ensure the sustained performance of safety-critical systems—ultimately reducing preventable road fatalities and improving overall vehicular safety across India.
In the Indian context, introduction of ADAS can play a positive role in improving road safety by assisting the driver and preventing unsafe driver behaviour. Technologies like Automated Emergency Braking (AEB), Lane Keep System, Adaptive Cruise Control, Driver Drowsiness Detection, Driver Alcohol detection etc., if deployed safely and used in a safe manner can help prevent many of the current road deaths in India. Safe deployment and safe use of such ADAS technologies require the systems to operate without failure within their operational design domains (ODD) and not surprise the drivers with sudden or unpredictable failures, to help develop their trust in the technology. As a result, identifying test scenarios remain a key step in the development of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). This remains a challenge due to the large test space especially for the Indian context due to the unpredictable traffic behaviour and occasional road infrastructure. In this paper, we introduce a novel open-access crowd-sourcing public platform, Safety Pool™ Studio, to enable crowdsourcing of traffic scenarios in the Indian context. Safety Pool™ Studio platform enables any member of the public or the road traffic ecosystem (e.g. traffic police, local authorities, academia etc.) to create a traffic scenario using a graphical interface, like a LEGO making exercise. This would enable the users to share their real-life experiences of traffic scenarios in a simple, accessible and inclusive manner and contribute to a global pool of traffic scenarios in the Indian context. Safety Pool™ Studio provides multi-language support for India’s regional languages like Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Gujrati among others. Safety Pool™ Studio has been developed in a way the graphical scenarios can automatically be converted into programmatic description of scenarios for traditional simulation-based testing of ADAS.
Simulation has become mission-critical for ADAS development. Model-based systems engineering can integrate modeling and simulation from the start of the design process. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are transforming vehicle safety, acting as the bridge between conventional driving and full autonomy. From adaptive cruise control to emergency braking and blind-spot detection, these technologies rely on a dense network of radar sensors, antennas, electronic control units and software. What unites them is the need for precise functionality under complex real-world situations. Achieving full reliability requires more than testing on the road; it demands a virtual approach grounded in simulation. Simulation has become mission-critical for ADAS development. As new vehicles integrate dozens of sensors into tightly constrained spaces, even subtle design decisions can affect system performance. Radar solutions, in particular, present unique challenges, especially as vehicle surfaces grow more complex and the number of onboard systems increases.
Autonomous vehicles utilise sensors, control systems and machine learning to independently navigate and operate through their surroundings, offering improved road safety, traffic management and enhanced mobility. This paper details the development, software architecture and simulation of control algorithms for key functionalities in a model that approaches Level 2 autonomy, utilising MATLAB Simulink and IPG CarMaker. The focus is on four critical areas: Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB), Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Lane Detection (LD) and Traffic Object Detection. Also, the integration of low-level PID controllers for precise steering, braking and throttle actuation, ensures smooth and responsive vehicle behaviour. The hardware architecture is built around the Nvidia Jetson Nano and multiple Arduino Nano microcontrollers, each responsible for controlling specific actuators within the drive-by-wire system, which includes the steering, brake and throttle actuators. Communication between these components is facilitated through the CAN protocol, which ensures accurate and reliable data transfer essential for real-time decision-making. AEB achieves precise emergency braking and enhances driver comfort through the use of PID controllers, while ACC leverages radar data to maintain a safe distance from the vehicle ahead. LD employs the Hough Transform algorithm for accurate road edge detection. Furthermore, a trained neural network within the system identifies and responds to traffic signals, signage, pedestrians and vehicles. The camera interfaces directly with the Jetson Nano, while radar data is shared with the IMU through a dedicated CAN bus. This integrated approach represents a significant advancement in autonomous vehicle control, thus contributing to enhanced safety, comfort and reliability for both drivers and passengers. This software architecture is designed based on aBaja 2024 competition and according to its rules, regulations, requirements and specifications, the controllers and simulations were designed.
Exactly when sensor fusion occurs in ADAS operations, late or early, impacts the entire system. Governments have been studying Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) since at least the late 1980s. Europe's Generic Intelligent Driver Support initiative ran from 1989 to 1992 and aimed “to determine the requirements and design standards for a class of intelligent driver support systems which will conform with the information requirements and performance capabilities of the individual drivers.” Automakers have spent the past 30 years rolling out such systems to the buying public. Toyota and Mitsubishi started offering radar-based cruise control to Japanese drivers in the mid-1990s. Mercedes-Benz took the technology global with its Distronic adaptive cruise control in the 1998 S-Class. Cadillac followed that two years later with FLIR-based night vision on the 2000 Deville DTS. And in 2003, Toyota launched an automated parallel parking technology called Intelligent Parking Assist on the Prius.
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