VISUAL CONTROL OF AN AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE (BART) - THE VEHICLE-FOLLOWING PROBLEM

The problem of vehicle-following includes automatic steering and speed control of an autonomous vehicle following the motion of a lead vehicle. In this paper, a visual control system for vehicle-following is presented. The developed system consists of the following modules: image processing, recursive filtering, and a driving command generator. First, the range and heading angle of the lead vehicle are obtained by visually identifying a unique tracking feature on the lead vehicle. Based upon this information, appropriate steering wheel and speed commands for driving are generated, which are then downloaded and executed on a microprocessor controller. Our visual control system was tested on BART (Binocular Autonomous Research Team), a testbed vehicle developed at Texas A&M University for autonomous mobility. Successful full-scale test runs have been accomplished for speeds up to 20 mi/h.