The emergence of adaptive cruise control in recent years has certainly been a welcome development, and now Honda is promising to take things one step further. It has today unveiled its Intelligent Adaptive Cruise Control (i-ACC), a technology it claims is capable of predicting the chances of a car cutting into your lane up to five seconds before it occurs.
i-ACC is the product of a research project undertaken by Honda that studied driver behavior across Europe. It says the system identifies which side of the road you are driving on, detects cars traveling in nearby lanes and which of them poses the greatest threat to the safety of your vehicle.
The system relies on a camera and radar to pick up neighboring vehicles, using an algorithm to assess the relations between those vehicles and calculate the chances of them cutting into your lane. In the event your fellow road user begins to dangerously wander across that white line, the i-ACC kicks in and adjusts your speed accordingly.
Honda says it is designed to react "very smoothly" so that the driver is not caught by surprise. This means a mild braking is applied initially and an icon lights up on the dashboard so the driver is kept in the loop. If needed, stronger braking then follows to adjust the vehicle's speed to keep a safe following distance.
"i-ACC is a significant breakthrough and a considerable further step towards a new generation of driver assistance systems that anticipate the behavior of other traffic participants," says Dr Schmuedderich, who led the i-ACC's development at Europe's Honda Research Institute.
Honda will debut its newer, smarter cruise control system later this year in the 2015 European CR-V Executive model.
Source: Honda
