Estimation of lateral offset and drift angle for application in secondary collision avoidance system

Recent reports show that the secondary collision on the road gives much higher fatality rate than the other traffic accidents. Many studies have been carried out to prevent the secondary accidents and as a result automotive companies began to introduce brake-based secondary collision avoidance systems. To prevent the secondary accidents it is important to monitor and control the lateral deviation of the vehicle after the primary collision. An estimator for the vehicle’s lateral offset and drift angle based on the in-vehicle sensors and the camera was developed in this paper. By employing sensor fusion scheme and applying extended Kalman filter, the estimator has been designed so that it works even when the camera loses the image of the lanes due to sudden change of the vehicle’s heading angle. For validation of the estimator, simulation has been carried out on various collision scenarios. The simulation results indicated that the estimator of this paper could calculate the vehicle’s lateral deviation with robustness that may be required for application in the secondary collision avoidance systems.