Intelligent Vehicle Systems

Palkovics, Laszlo

The volume of both passenger and freight traffic on our roads continues to increase exponentially and the infrastructure is unable to keep pace with this growth. The basic problem this creates is how is to safely increase traffic density i.e. without adding to the burden on the environment or the transport infrastructure as well as reducing the number of traffic accidents. The stability of the traffic process cannot be ensured without increasing the intelligence of vehicles, which means the partial or entire withdrawal of the driver from the control process. The lecture gives a summary of the most important achievements in this field, introduces the control systems used on the various levels of vehicle and vehicle-group, their sensors and anomalies. The lecture demonstrates in detail the system of sensors that measure the movement status of a vehicle and collect information on its the environment, and the functioning of which depends on or is independent of the immediate interference of the driver.

The lecture also touches on fully automated traffic and vehicle systems under research where vehicles arranged in special formations are automatically led through specific routes or traffic junctions (according to the intentions of the driver or a predefined route). Besides the technical issues the lecture also deals with some of the legal and moral problems of the field that influence the spread of intelligent vehicle systems.

About the lecturer