Abstract— The concept of assisting driver in the task of longitudinal vehicle control is known as cruise control. Starting from the cruise control devices of the seventies and eighties, now the technology has reached cooperative adaptive cruise control. This paper will address the basic concept of adaptive cruise control and the requirement to realize its improved versions including stop and go adaptive cruise control and cooperative adaptive cruise control. The conventional cruise control was only capable of maintaining a set speed by accelerating or decelerating the vehicle. Adaptive cruise control devices are capable of assisting the driver to keep a safe distance from the preceding vehicle by controlling the engine throttle and brake according to the sensor data about the vehicle. Most of the systems use RADAR as the sensor, a few uses LIDAR also. Controller includes the digital signal processing modules and microcontroller chips specially designed for actuating throttle and brake. The stop and go cruise control is for the slow and congested traffic of the cities where the traffic may be frequently stopped. Co-operative Adaptive Cruise Controls are not yet released but postulations are already there.

Index Terms— Cruise Control, Stop and Go Cruise Control, RADAR, Sensors

Cite: Vishnu Sankar, " Review on Adaptive Cruise Control in Automobiles," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 404-409, April 2014.