Adaptive cruise control

I.V.Srujana, S.Swapanthi
Department of communication engineering
Sruji456@gmail.com s.swapanthi@gmail.com

Kakinada

CONTENTS: INTRODUCTION HISTORY WHAT CRUISE CONTROL DOES ELECTRONIC CRUISE CONTROL

CRUISE CONTROL ACCELERATION AND DECELARATION CONTROLLING THE CRUISE CONTROL ADAPTIVE CRUISE CONTROL
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES APPLICATIONS

I. INTRODUCTION

Cruise control (sometimes known as speed control or auto cruise) is a system that automatically controls the speed of a motor vehicle. The system takes over the throttle of the car to maintain a steady speed as set by the driver. A throttle is the mechanism by which the flow of a fluid is managed by constriction or obstruction. An engine's power can be increased or decreased by the restriction of inlet gases (i.e., by the use of a throttle), but usually decreased. Cruise control is an invaluable feature on American cars. Without cruise control, long road trips would be more tiring, for the driver at least, and those of us suffering from lead-foot syndrome would probably get a lot more speeding tickets. Cruise control is far more common on American cars than European cars, because the roads in America are generally bigger and straighter, and destinations are farther apart. With traffic continually increasing, basic cruise control is becoming less useful, but instead of becoming obsolete, cruise control systems are adapting to this new reality -- soon, cars will be equipped with adaptive cruise control, which will allow your car to follow the car in front of it while continually adjusting speed to maintain a safe distance. II. HISTORY . Speed control with a centrifugal governor was used in automobiles as early as the 1910s, notably by Peerless. Peerless advertised that their system would "maintain speed whether up hill or down". The technology was invented by James Watt and Matthew Boulton in 1788 to control steam engines. The governor adjusts the throttle position as the speed of the engine changes with different loads. Modern cruise control (also known as a speedostat) was invented in 1945 by the blind inventor and mechanical engineer Ralph Teetor. His idea was born out of the frustration of riding in a car driven by his lawyer, who kept speeding up and slowing down as he talked. The first car with Teetor's system was the Chrysler Imperial in 1958. This system calculated ground speed based on driveshaft rotations and used a solenoid to vary throttle position as needed. III. WHAT CRUISE CONTROL DOES The cruise control system actually has a lot of functions other than controlling the speed of your car. For instance, the cruise control pictured below can accelerate or decelerate the car by 1 mph with the tap of a button. Hit the button five times to go 5 mph faster. There are also several important safety features -- the cruise control will disengage as soon as you hit the brake pedal, and it won't engage at speeds less than 25 mph (40 kph). The system pictured below has five buttons: On, Off, Set/Accel, Resume and Coast. It also has a sixth control -- the brake pedal, and if your car has a manual transmission the clutch pedal is also hooked up to the cruise control. a. Cruise control has been used by a number of authors to illustrate software design methodologies. This problem statement is derived from the one Booch used to describe object-oriented programming [Booch86] and the one Birchenough and Cameron later used to compare JSD to OOD:

A cruise-control system exists to maintain the speed of a car, even over varying terrain, when turned on by the driver. When the brake is applied, the system must relinquish speed control until told to resume. The system must also steadily increase or decrease speed to reach a new maintenance speed when directed to do so by the driver.

This is the block diagram of the hardware for such a system. There are several inputs:
System on/off: If on, denotes that the cruise-control system should maintain the car speed. Engine on/off: If on, denotes that the car engine is turned on; the cruise-control system is

only active if the engine is on. Pulses from wheel: A pulse is sent for every revolution of the wheel. Accelerator: Indication of how far the accelerator has been pressed. Brake: On when the brake is pressed; the cruise-control system temporarily reverts to manual control if the brake is pressed. Increase/Decrease Speed: Increase or decrease the maintained speed; only applicable if the cruise-control system is on. Resume: Resume the last maintained speed; only applicable if the cruise-control system is on. Clock: Timing pulse every millisecond. There is one output from the system:
Throttle: Digital value for the engineer throttle setting.

b. Theory of operation
In modern designs, the cruise control may need to be turned on before use in some designs it is always "on" but not always enabled, others have a separate "on/off" switch, while still others just have an "on" switch that must be pressed after the vehicle has been started. Most designs have buttons for "set", "resume", "accelerate", and "coast" functions. Some also have a "cancel" button. Alternatively, depressing the brake or clutch pedal will disable the system so the driver can change the speed without resistance from the system. The system is operated with controls easily within the driver's reach, usually with two or more buttons on the steering wheel spokes or on the edge of the hub like those on Honda vehicles, on the turn signal stalk like in many older General Motors vehicles

or on a dedicated stalk like those found in, particularly Toyota and Lexus. Earlier designs used a dial to set speed choice. The driver must bring the vehicle up to speed manually and use a button to set the cruise control to the current speed. The cruise control takes its speed signal from a rotating driveshaft, speedometer cable, wheel speed sensor from the engine's RPM or from internal speed pulses produced electronically by the vehicle. Most systems do not allow the use of the cruise control below a certain speed (normally around 25 mph). The vehicle will maintain that speed by pulling the throttle cable with a solenoid, a vacuum driven servomechanism or by using the electronic systems built into the vehicle (fully electronic) if it uses a 'drive-by-wire' system. All cruise control systems must be capable of being turned off both explicitly and automatically, when the driver depresses the brake and often also the clutch. Cruise control often includes a memory feature to resume the set speed after braking and a coast feature to disengage the system without braking. When the cruise control is engaged, the throttle can still be used to accelerate the car, but once the pedal is released the car will then slow down until it reaches the previously set speed. On the latest vehicles fitted with electronic throttle control, cruise control can be easily integrated into the vehicle's engine management system. Modern "adaptive" systems (see below) include the ability to automatically reduce speed when the distance to a car in front, or the speed limit, decreases. This is an advantage for those driving in unfamiliar areas. The cruise control systems of some vehicles incorporate a "speed limiter" function, which will not allow the vehicle to accelerate beyond a pre-set maximum; this can usually be overridden by fully depressing the accelerator pedal. (Note that most systems will prevent the vehicle accelerating beyond the chosen speed, but will not apply the brakes in the event of overspeeding downhill.) IV. ELECTRONIC CRUISE CONTROL

Daniel Aaron Wisner invented Automotive Electronic Cruise Control in 1968 as an engineer for RCA's Industrial and Automation Systems Division in Plymouth, Michigan. His invention described in two patents filed that year (#3570622 & #3511329), with the second modifying his original design by debuting digital memory, was the first electronic gadgetry to play a role in controlling a car and ushered in the computer-controlled era in the automobile industry. Two decades lapsed before an integrated circuit for his design was developed by Motorola Inc. as the MC14460 Auto Speed Control Processor in CMOS. As a result, cruise control was eventually adopted by automobile manufacturers as standard equipment and nearly every car built and many trucks are fitted with a configuration of the circuitry and hardware nearly identical to his prototype. The advantage of electronic speed control over its mechanical predecessor, which was featured on luxury models but never gained wide acceptance, was that it could be easily integrated with electronic accident avoidance and engine management systems V. CRUISE CONTRL ACCELERATION AND DECELARATION The cruise control system controls the speed of your car the same way you do -- by adjusting the throttle position. But cruise control actuates the throttle valve by a cable connected to an actuator, instead of by pressing a pedal. The throttle valve controls the power and speed of the engine

by limiting how much air the engine takes in (see How Fuel Injection Systems Work for more details). In the picture above, you can see two cables connected to a pivot that moves the throttle valve. One cable comes from the accelerator pedal, and one from the actuator. When the cruise control is engaged, the actuator moves the cable connected to the pivot, which adjusts the throttle; but it also pulls on the cable that is connected to the gas pedal -- this is why your pedal moves up and down when the cruise control is engaged. Many cars use actuators powered by engine vacuum to open and close the throttle. These systems use a small, electronically-controlled valve to regulate the vacuum in a diaphragm. This works in a similar way to the brake booster, which provides power to your brake system. VI. CONTROLLING THE CRUISE CONTROL

The brain of a cruise control system is a small computer that is normally found under the hood or behind the dashboard. It connects to the throttle control seen in the previous section, as well as several sensors. The diagram below shows the inputs and outputs of a typical cruise control system.

A good cruise control system accelerates aggressively to the desired speed without overshooting, and then maintains that speed with little deviation no matter how much weight is in the

car, or how steep the hill you drive up. Controlling the speed of a car is a classic application of control system theory. The cruise control system controls the speed of the car by adjusting the throttle position, so it needs sensors to tell it the speed and throttle position. It also needs to monitor the controls so it can tell what the desired speed is and when to disengage. The most important input is the speed signal; the cruise control system does a lot with this signal. First, let's start with one of the most basic control systems you could have -- a proportional control. In a proportional control system, the cruise control adjusts the throttle proportional to the error, the error being the difference between the desired speed and the actual speed. So, if the cruise control is set at 60 mph and the car is going 50 mph, the throttle position will be open quite far. When the car is going 55 mph, the throttle position opening will be only half of what it was before. The result is that the closer the car gets to the desired speed, the slower it accelerates. Also, if you were on a steep enough hill, the car might not accelerate at all. Most cruise control systems use a control scheme called proportional-integral-derivative control (a.k.a. PID control). Don't worry, you don't need to know any calculus to make it through this explanation -- just remember that:
The integral of speed is distance. The derivative of speed is acceleration.

A PID control system uses these three factors -- proportional, integral and derivative, calculating each individually and adding them to get the throttle position. We've already discussed the proportional factor. The integral factor is based on the time integral of the vehicle speed error. Translation: the difference between the distance your car actually traveled and the distance it would have traveled if it were going at the desired speed, calculated over a set period of time. This factor helps the car deal with hills, and also helps it settle into the correct speed and stay there. Let's say your car starts to go up a hill and slows down. The proportional control increases the throttle a little, but you may still slow down. After a little while, the integral control will start to increase the throttle, opening it more and more, because the longer the car maintains a speed slower than the desired speed, the larger the distance error gets. Now let's add in the final factor, the derivative. Remember that the derivative of speed is acceleration. This factor helps the cruise control respond quickly to changes, such as hills. If the car starts to slow down, the cruise control can see this acceleration (slowing down and speeding up are both acceleration) before the speed can actually change much, and respond by increasing the throttle position. VII. ADAPTIVE CRUISE CONTROL Two companies are developing a more advanced cruise control that can automatically adjust a car's speed to maintain a safe following distance. This new technology, called adaptive cruise control, uses forward-looking radar, installed behind the grill of a vehicle, to detect the speed and distance of the vehicle ahead of it. Adaptive cruise control is similar to conventional cruise control in that it maintains the vehicle's pre-set speed. However, unlike conventional cruise control, this new system can automatically adjust speed in order to maintain a proper distance between vehicles in the same lane.

This is achieved through a radar headway sensor, digital signal processor and longitudinal controller. If the lead vehicle slows down, or if another object is detected, the system sends a signal to the engine or braking system to decelerate. Then, when the road is clear, the system will reaccelerate the vehicle back to the set speed. The 77-GHz Autocruise radar system made by TRW has a forward-looking range of up to 492 feet (150 meters), and operates at vehicle speeds ranging from 18.6 miles per hour (30 kph) to 111 mph (180 kph). Delphi's 76-GHz system can also detect objects as far away as 492 feet, and operates at speeds as low as 20 mph (32 kph). Adaptive cruise control is just a preview of the technology being developed by both companies. These systems are being enhanced to include collision warning capabilities that will warn drivers through visual and/or audio signals that a collision is imminent and that braking or evasive steering is needed. VIII. ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES

Some of those advantages include:

Its usefulness for long drives (reducing driver fatigue, improving comfort by allowing positioning changes more safely) across Interstate highways and sparsely populated roads. This usually results in better fuel efficiency. Some drivers use it to avoid unconsciously violating speed limits. A driver who otherwise tends to unconsciously increase speed over the course of a highway journey may avoid a speeding ticket. Such drivers should note, however, that a cruise control may go over its setting on a downhill which is steep enough to accelerate with an idling engine. Note however, that in many jurisdictions, officers cannot write a ticket for a violation of a speed limit due to a steep hill.

However, cruise control can also lead to accidents due to several factors, such as: caused by highway hypnosis or incapacitated drivers; future systems may include a dead man's switch to avoid this. When used during inclement weather or while driving on wet or snow- and/or ice-covered roads, the vehicle could go into a skid (although this may be somewhat mitigated by cars equipped with Electronic Stability Control). Stepping on the brake such as to disengage the cruise control often results in the driver losing control of the vehicle. Driving over "rolling" terrain, with gentle up and down portions, can usually be done more economically (using less fuel) by a skilled driver viewing the approaching terrain, by maintaining a relatively constant throttle position and allowing the vehicle to accelerate on the downgrades and decelerate on upgrades, while reducing power when cresting a rise and adding a bit before an upgrade is reached. Cruise control will tend to overthrottle on the upgrades and retard on the downgrades, wasting the energy storage capabilities available from the inertia of the vehicle. The inefficiencies from cruise control can be even greater relative to skilled driving in hybrid vehicles. Many countries establish that it is illegal to drive within city limits with the cruise control feature activated.
The lack of need to maintain constant pedal pressure, which can help lead to accidents