LANE TRACKING AND AUTONOMOUS CRUISE CONTROL FOR AUTOMATIC HIGHWAY SYSTEM Fahad A.

Siddiqui, Muhammad Asif, Zain Anwar Ali and Samreen Amir

Electronic Engineering Department, Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, Pakistan
fahad_ahmed@hotmail.com, masif.ssuet@gmail.com, zainanwar86@hotmail.com, samreen.amir4@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
In this paper a vision based lane tracking and velociy dependant cruise control system is presented as automatic highway system. The system developed, uses different image processing techniques to detect lanes. It maintains a safe distance by calculating the distance from the leading vehicle. For lane tracking and to calculate the orientation of the vehicle on the road, Hough transform is used. On the other hand, a PID controller is designed for the nonlinear vehicle dynamics in order to track the velocity of the leading vehicle and to maintain a safe distance. The complete model has been implemented and simulated using Matlab and the results shows that the system successfully detects the lanes and the distance from the leading vehicle.

1.

INTRODUCTION

Pakistan is the 36th largest country of the world with respect to the area having 796,095 square km [1]. In Pakistan there are ten motor ways which has been used nationwide and all of those are stretched all across the nation. The accident ratio is fairly high and according to research most of the accident occurs due to the human error. Pakistan can benefit greatly with Automatic Highway System (AHS). In the developed world, during the last few years' automatic highway system became active area of research. AHS is an important area to avoid accident and ensure passengers safety. Along with it another important feature is the effective use of the space available on the road to maximize the utilization and to reduce the congestion time wasted in traffic jams [2]. By automating all the vehicles on the road and by making those coordinating with each other seamlessly will improve the passengers comfort in traveling. Another advantage of a system which makes sure that the vehicle is driving at the lawful speed and following all the other law enforced by the state. This will avoid any fines and point on the driver's license other than just improving the road safety. According to statistics 92% of the accidents happened due to the human error [3]. The reason could be anything ranging from tiredness, sleeping while driving, talking on the phone or any other thing that may divert the driver's attention off the road. AHS will make sure that the human interaction is not required at all. This will relieve the driver from the tiresome task of driving straight for miles, which in turn make traveling a less of a trouble [2]. In theory, AHS will be a collection of different systems working together to achieve a collective task of automating a car's drive on any highway [4]. This ranges from automating different systems present in a car in order to make it drive on its own without a human interaction to best possible route calculation on the basis of current load on the highway and the distance to be covered. It must utilize the resources, both of

the car and the transportation network, efficiently [5]. Which mean it must reach the destination with utilizing minimum fuel and creating minimum congestion on the road. It is widely accepted in the automation community that it would be a step by step transition from current manual system to the development of different systems automating these processes one at a time [4]. In the long run, these different systems like cruise control, GPS navigation, lane detection system, ABS system, RF based interaction between vehicles and collision avoidance system etc, to interact with each other and a master system to get guidelines and updates on road traffic in order to route the journey effectively and drive on its own to the destination [6]. There has been a lot of interest during the last decade in the areas of automated highway system and automatic lane detection [4]. Many algorithms have been developed to detect lanes and to maintain a safe distance with the leading vehicles [7]. Most of the research work done in the field is either limited to the lane detection or obstacle recognition or distance management. Techniques used in lane detection ranges from accumulator array voting or parabolic model for lane modeling [8], [9]. For safe distance management has been done by either using fuzzy logic controller or support vector machine [10], [11]. Beside their effectiveness both these areas are treated as separate. In the paper an effective automatic highway system is proposed by combining the both lane tracking and automatic cruise control. The objective of this paper is to develop an effective automatic highway system that can track the lane and regulate the vehicle speed by following the lead vehicle velocity. The developed system consists of two main parts. The first part is to detect the lane marks by using series of image processing techniques and then use dynamic model to track and follow the lane. The second part is to detect the lead vehicle velocity, regulate its own speed and maintain a safe distance. This safe distance depends on the lead vehicle velocity. The rest of the paper is organized as follows; section II will discuss the lane detection and tracking while section III will present the automatic cruise control. Section IV will present the experimental result and section V will end the paper with conclusion.

2.

LANE DETECTION AND TRACKING

This section will discuss the developed vision system for detecting and tracking lanes in order to keep the vehicle in a specific lane and indicate the user if the vehicle is crossing over to next lane. This is done as the paper is only concerned with the longitudinal control of the vehicle and the lateral control is out of the scope of this paper. The vehicle is equipped with a color camera which can provide color information relative to the highway. Figure1 showns a typical image of Pakistan Motorway. At first, image of the road is captured using color camera. Color camera

3.

AUTOMATED CRUISE CONTROL

The second part of the paper deals with the system which makes sure that the vehicle maintains a safe distance from the leading vehicle. The possibilities are that it either follows at the speed of that vehicle or the maximum legal limit allowed on the highways which is 120 km/hr for Pakistan. The system dynamics are taken from [12] which define the dynamics of the ith vehicle by the state vector as follows: = , , (4) Where denotes the inter vehicle spacing, is the velocity of the vehicle and gives driving or braking force. The sign of differentiate between the driving and breaking force. Positive sign means that the force is accelerating and negative sign shows braking of the leading vehicle. = (5) The longitudinal dynamics of the system can be expressed by the following equations; = (6) = = ( ( + ) + ) (7) (8)

Figure 1: Image of Pakistan Motorway provides lots of information and can be used to extract various road features such as lanes in the road and road boundaries etc. The next step is ROI after capturing the color image. It is used to restrict the image processing and reduced its image processing time. The ROI is set in the half of the center bottom of the image once the road boundaries have been detected now than it will convert into grayscale and then into binary image using Sobel edge detection. In this work feature based approach is used for lane tracking. The edges extracted from the ROI are used to form a feature vector using Hough transform. The Hough transform is used to detect the lines in an edge image and then Hough lines are used as a feature vector. The feature vector contains (1, 1) and (2, 2) which define the orientation and position of the road boundaries with respect to the image center. The tracking parameters are calculated in order to guide the lane detection robot to follow the road markings. It may require several mechanisms. Equation 1 and 2 shows the relation of position and orientation of the road boundaries to the vehicle. TX = | 2 1|/2 (1) X = min(90o 1, 2 90o) (2) The least value for orientation is choosing to keep away from any big change in one instant step. Once the orientation of vehicle is calculated, the vehicle has aligned and orientated itself in road boundaries. The lane detection vehicle subsequently starts moving in the lane tracking and begins autonomous navigation. After calculating the tracking parameters, dynamic model is used to expect the tracking behavior over time. Accurate modeling of the target dynamics can improve the prediction of the location of the target while visual support is insufficient due to occlusion, noise, or visual clustering. Equation 3 describes the second order autoregressive model for road detection robot. X(t) = X (t 1) + (X (t 1) X( t 2)) + b(t) (3) where X are the orientation of the vehicle respectively, b is the regression coefficient and (t) is the stochastic disturbances.

In the above equations, is the mass of the vehicle which is 1200kg, is 0.3 Ns2/m2 which is aerodynamic drag for any vehicle. is the control input to the system. If is greater than zero the input is throttle, where as less than zero value means that brakes have been applied. is the engine time constant which is 0.2 seconds. The reference input r(t) is set to 0 which defines the "velocitydependent headway policy". It states that the plant output y 0 for all i, where = + . A good and sensible standard for the inter vehicle spacing is around 14kph to 20kph. The distance is dependent on the speed of the leading vehicle. The value of is 0.9 for all i. The requirement of the system is a controller for individual vehicle which can have good tracking with almost no steady state error. The designed system in Simulink is given in figure 2, which shows the major component of the system used to implement the PID controller. The function block "automatic highway system" has all the system dynamics implemented which were defined by the equations (6) (8). The dynamics were nonlinear for the system, but the standard PID controller can only

Figure 2: Simulink diagram of automatic cruise control

be designed for linear systems. To accomplish the task of designing the PID controller, the equations of the system dynamics were made linear. The gains of P, I and D components of PID controllers were calculated for the linear version of the equation. Even though the PID controller is designed for the linear version of the system dynamics, it was implemented on the actual non-linear system. The system is then tested for a range of different possible inputs, but the response was stable and the controller produced the required results. It is possible that it may get unstable for a very highly changing input, but that is not really possible in a real life scenario.

4.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

(a)

This section will present the results obtained from the both lane tracking and automatic cruise control system. Figure 3 and figure 4 show the result of various image processing steps implemented in MATLAB without the code optimization. After the orientation of the lane is detected the dynamic model is used to track the lane. The lane tracking algorithm is tested on various real and synthetic images with wide range of scenarios. The output of the tracking algorithm is calculated to generate the navigational command for the vehicle. The tracking errors in both translation and orientation position is shown in figure 5. It can be seen that overall error of the within the certain range which shows the effectiveness of the proposed tracking system. After lane detection and tracking the next step is following the speed of the lead vehicle. Here it is assume that the both vehicle are equipped with necessary sensor to measure the speed and distance. The system is first tested with square input which shows the sudden acceleration and deceleration of the leader vehicle as shown in figure 6. This provides us with system responses for changing input values and gives us insight in the system performance for acceleration and deceleration effects of the leading vehicle. It can be observed that the following vehicle tracking the leader velocity with slight overshoot and get steady in 7 seconds. Figure 7 shows

(b) Figure 4: a) Hough space of ROI image, b) Lane extracted using Hough Transform

Figure 5: Errors in vehicle translation and orientation position the tracking error of the developed system. It can be seen that it catches up with the leader velocity with zero steady state.

(a)

5.

CONCLUSION

(b)
Figure 3: a) ROI image, b) edge image of ROI

In this work, a combined vision based lane tracking system and automatic cruise control system is presented. The developed systems are proven valid to track the road lane and lead vehicle velocity. It is shown that road lane can be detected and the track by using the simple image processing techniques. Although the system dynamics used for automatic cruise control is non-linear, standard PID effectively track the lead vehicle velocity. The tracking error for both lane tracking and vehicle following system are very low, which validate the developed system. Beside developed systems effectiveness, the error can further reduce by using the intelligent control schemes.

6.

REFERENCES

[1] Demographics Yearbook, Table 3: "population by sex, rate of population increase, surface area and density", United Nations Statistics Division, 2006. [2] Varaya P., "Smart Cars on Smart Roads: Problem of Control", IEEE Trans. Automation and Control, vol 38, No. 2, 1993. [3] Ung Chun Hour, H.E., "Country Report on Road Safety in Cambodia", 22 june 2007. [4] Horowitz, R. and Varaya, P., "Control Design of Automated Highway System", Proc of IEEE , vol 88, issue 7, July 2000. [5] Hall, R.W. and Caliskan, C. "Design and evaluation of an automated highway system with optimized lane assignment", Transprotation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, vol &, issue 1, Feb 1999. [6] Ashley, S. "Smart Cars and Smart Highways", Magzine: Mechanical Engineering, The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, May 1998. [7] Lygeros, J. Godbole, D.N. and Sastry, S., Verified controller for Automated Vehicles, IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, April 1998. [8] Gupta, R.A. Snyder, W. and Pitts, W.S., Concurrent visual multiple lane detection for autonomous vehicles, Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2010. [9] Longjard, C. Kumsawat, P. Attakitmongkol, K. and Srikaew, A., Automatic Lane Detection and Navigation using Pattern Matching Mode, Proc. of the 7th WSEAS International Conference on Signal, Speech and Image Processing, Sept 2007. [10] Sotelo, M.A. Fernandez, D. Naranjo, J.E. Gonzalez, C. Garcia, R. de Pedro, D. and Reviejo, J. "Vision-based adaptive cruise control for intelligent road vehicles", Proc. of International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2004. [11] lvarez,S. Sotelo, M.A. Ocaa, M. Fernndez, D. And Parra, I., "Vision-based Target Detection in Road Environments ", Proc. of the 1st WSEAS International Conference on Vsualzaton, Imagng and Smulaton, 2008. [12] Passino, K.M. and Yurkovich, S. Fuzzy Control, 1st edition, Addison-Wesley, 1998.

Figure 6: Velocity Response of the follow vehicle

Figure 7: Velocity tracking error of the follow vehicle