Image Driving Speed Control for a Smart Car System

Abstract

In the Seventh Freescale Cup National College Smart Car Competition, we designed and implemented a smart car to realize the autonomous driving based on road tracking method. This paper presents three main aspects of the smart car, the mechanical structure; hardware system; software framework and algorithms employed for road tracking and PID speed control. The image-based road tracking system was used to control the steering angle and the speed of the smart car. The images captured by an analog CMOS camera were preprocessed by a monochrome binarization circuit, and then the binarization signals were fed into the MCU as well as the speed feedback signals obtained by a rotary photoelectric encoder, as input variables for controlling the motor, steering gear etc, by the MCU. Experimental results showed that this smart car can accurately recognize the images of various road elements to precisely adjust the steering angle, and steadily run at a maximum controllable speed.