Bidirectional adaptive cruise control for intelligent vehicles

Most of the previous investigated adaptive cruise control methods focused on maintaining a safe front clearance of the host vehicle. Due to fault or heat fading, the vehicle behind an intelligent vehicle may lose part of braking performance and collide with the intelligent vehicle. Thus the control system of an intelligent vehicle should simultaneously maintain the front and rear clearances on such a critical condition, which is seldom discussed before. In this study, a bidirectional adaptive cruise control algorithm is proposed to reduce such collisions. Simulations have been done to confirm the validity of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the collisions caused by the following vehicle with low braking performance, which cannot be resolved by traditional adaptive cruise control. Thus, compared with the traditional adaptive cruise control, the proposed algorithm can improve the safety of intelligent vehicles in collision avoidance.