Modeling, Simulation and Control of Pedestrian Avoidance Maneuver for an Urban Electric Vehicle

In this paper, the mathematical model of an electric vehicle, as well as the control system for avoiding pedestrians in urban traffic is described. The vehicle is modeled as a continuous system consisting of several subsystems. The discrete model of several sensors and actuators, a decision system, and low-level controllers for acceleration/braking and steering systems are added. Based on this model, a pedestrian avoidance maneuver for typical speeds in city traffic is simulated. When the sensory system detects a pedestrian in the vehicle’s path, the decision system calculates its trajectory. Using this information, the speed and/or direction that the vehicle must take in order to avoid the accident are estimated. These values are sent to the low-level controllers of the accelerator/brake and steering, which generate the signals to be applied to such systems to achieve the desired trajectory and speed

Monovision-based vehicle detection, distance and relative speed measurement in urban traffic

This study presents a monovision-based system for on-road vehicle detection and computation of distance and relative speed in urban traffic. Many works have dealt with monovision vehicle detection, but only a few of them provide the distance to the vehicle which is essential for the control of an intelligent transportation system. The system proposed integrates a single camera reducing the monetary cost of stereovision and RADAR-based technologies. The algorithm is divided in three major stages. For vehicle detection, the authors use a combination of two features: the shadow underneath the vehicle and horizontal edges. They propose a new method for shadow thresholding based on the grey-scale histogram assessment of a region of interest on the road. In the second and third stages, the vehicle hypothesis verification and the distance are obtained by means of its number plate whose dimensions and shape are standardised in each country. The analysis of consecutive frames is employed to calculate the relative speed of the vehicle detected. Experimental results showed excellent performance in both vehicle and number plate detections and in the distance measurement, in terms of accuracy and robustness in complex traffic scenarios and under different lighting conditions