DEVICE FOR CALCULATING GRADIENT OF ROAD AND CAR SPEED CONTROLLER

摘要

PURPOSE: To enable a device mounted on a vehicle for calculating gradient of a road to calculate the gradient of the road where the vehicle is traveling through a simple processing by extracting left and right lane markers indicating the lane on which the vehicle is traveling from an imaged picture showing the stage of the road and detecting the width of the lane on the picture. CONSTITUTION: An image pickup means composed of a CCD camera 201 picks up the scene in front of the vehicle 210 having the image pickup means and a picture processor 203 extracts lane markers and features of vehicles from a picture inputted from the camera 201. The processor 203 also detects the lane width for every scanning line on the picture and the position of the precending vehicle. An arithmetic processing section 204 which operates as a road gradient calculating means and vehicle-to-vehicle distance calculating means calculates the distance to the preceding vehicle and the gradient of the road from the output of the processor 203 and pickup condition. A car speed control section 207 outputs a control parameter in accordance with a preset control program based on the gradient of the road and distance data outputted from the processing section 204 and the speed of the vehicle outputted from a car speed sensor 206.