Our Project

Project Background
TJA or Traffic Jam Assist is a system designed to help commuters on their drive to work on a day-to-day basis. More and more we are seeing extreme levels of congestion in our cities due to the quantity of vehicles on the road. This can be incredibly frustrating and even dangerous in traffic, with vehicles stopping too fast or getting too close to one another. The system we propose would create a less stressful, and safer environment for the driver. Utilizing modern radar and camera technology, we can track and follow the vehicle ahead while maintaining a safe distance. Our system which updates every 100ms is almost 3 times as fast as a normal human being. This allows for extreme levels of precision and can lead to the prevention of accidents provided it is used in the proper connotation.
Project Description
Traffic Jam Assist is based on the Adaptive Cruise Control(ACC) system common to most modern vehicles. Basic Cruise control simply maintains a constant speed. ACC uses a forward looking radar to identify a target vehicle and determine the closing rate to that target. Ideally the closing rate should be zero. It can be positive in that the closing distance is growing and no action is needed. If negative then you are getting too close to the target and need to slow down and maintain a set distance. Typically the drive has 3 selections for the distance. In addition if a forward looking camera is available you can add lane following which keeps you in the middle of the lane you are in. To this pre-existing feature we wish to add, only on particular limited access highways, the ability to adjust to traffic flow by stopping behind the target vehicle in the case of slow and stopped traffic. If the target vehicle then starts back up the vehicle you are in will also start up, following at the set distance and controlling the closing rate. Your set speed has not changed and should you change lanes your vehicle will resume the set speed assuming there are no other target vehicles.