An Ultrasonic Sensor Distance Induced Automatic Braking Automobile Collision Avoidance System

Abstract

Collisions in automobiles have become a major safety concern; cases of damage and death due to automobile collisions are frequently reported. The number of pedestrians knocked to death by automobiles is also on the rise in cities and highways. Further into the game reserves, wild animals are also frequently knocked to death by automobiles. The cost of a life cannot be estimated, the cost of damages to the automobiles also impacts negatively on investment. In most cases drivers fail to notice the presence of obstacles ahead and brakes need a driver’s response to operate thus increasing the response time, hence reducing their reliability. Many approaches to automobile crash avoidance systems have been proposed in recent time, however, such approaches mainly concentrate on steering maneuvering control. In addition, these approaches do not take into consideration the safety distance to stoppage of the automobile, more so, many approaches only provide a warning signal to the driver for activating the automatic braking. This always provides a room for human error. This paper presents the development of an automatic microcontroller based crash avoidance system that employs obstacle detection and distance measurement using ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles and their distances. Once the obstacle has been detected and safe separation distance is reached, the automobile performs safety distance induced braking at that distance to bring the automobile to a stoppage. From the results obtained after tests, the system has an average response time of 0.86s to the activation of the brakes and a 12.8 percentage error with respect to the obstacle real distance.