Navigation as a Virtual Sensor for Enhanced Lighting Preview Control

The principal interest of currently available bending light systems using vehicle information (vehicle speed, steering wheel angle) is to adjust the beam orientation according to the driver´s manoeuvres. However, this kind of lighting is not anticipative and does not take the global driving situations and contexts (bend, city, motorway ...) into account. The use of navigation systems can provide good anticipation results and information about the driving environment. This paper presents an active automotive lighting system using predictive navigation data. This approach concerns several types of lighting strategies according to the driving situations and contexts considered. The originality of this work relies on an event-based analysis of the driving situation carried out with the navigation as a virtual sensor. This solution provides complete information on the driving situation and not only nodes and shape points dependent data. For the headlights control, a control law using a continuous curvature path model is implemented. This curvature-oriented preview control technique ensures the required anticipation level as can be seen in the experimental results presented.