VITA II-active collision avoidance in real traffic

An autonomous road vehicle is presented which will prevent collisions automatically. This safety relevant project is part of PROMETHEUS (program for a European traffic with highest efficiency and unprecedented safety). The vehicle demonstrator VITA II (vision technology application) consists of a passenger car which demonstrates its capabilities of collision avoidance on motorways. The video cameras installed in the vehicle acquire information about the environment. The hardware consists of two clusters of parallel processors. The application cluster hosts the computer vision, planning, decision and control modules to perform driving tasks such as: lane keeping with desired speed, reduction of the speed in narrow curves obeying the restrictions given by traffic signs, following the vehicles in front with adaptive distance control, computer vision based traffic sign recognition, object detection and recognition around the vehicle and autonomous immediate collision avoidance maneuvres including overtaking. The vehicle cluster provides the basic structure to control the vehicle by computer.