The embedded driving-assistance system on Taiwan iTS-1

Vehicle automation is an important research topic of advanced vehicle systems (AVS). Taiwan iTS-1 is the first smart car with autonomous driving in Taiwan. In this paper, an embedded driving-assistance system is presented. The definition of hierarchical-control structure is necessary in the system to deal with sensorial inputs and environmental and procedural knowledge to manage vehicle actuators in order to accomplish various driving tasks. Upper-level control perceives road environment and determines the proper and safe operation modes including lane-keeping, lane-change, cruise control, adaptive cruise control, and stop-and-go. In each mode, the desired-velocity and reference-trajectory are primarily determined, and then are forwarded to vehicle-body control. To incorporate well driver behavior into our system, vehicle-body control utilizes the fuzzy control technique to manage the fundamental actuators of vehicle, steering wheel, throttle, and brake, to adapt to the desired command (velocity and trajectory). The core controller is built-in on a DSP-based embedded computing platform. The aim of our system is to provide the driving-assistance in the same way human drivers do.