Nowadays, nearly all car manufacturers can build a cruise control system (tempomat)
in their cars if the customer demands. Usually, these systems can maintain a certain
speed, set by the driver of the vehicle. The tempomat system can be extended with
a distance measurement sensor in some top-end luxury cars, to measure the distance
of objects in front of the car (this can be another car or some kind of obstacle).
By using these systems, a certain following distance can be set, and the tempomat
tries to maintain it by using small amounts of acceleration or breaking according
to the data provided by the sensor.
These adaptive cruise control systems are expensive, and the detection range and field
of view of the sensors are limited. In this paper, we present an adaptive cruise control
system, which sets the speed of the vehicle according to messages distributed over
an ad-hoc wireless network. The wireless communication eliminates the problems caused
by bad visibility or being out of line of sight. The distributed messages contain
the exact position, speed and direction of the sender vehicle. The described algorithm
determines also the vehicle to be followed, when the driver turns on the tempomat.
