Controlling headway between successive vehicles. Paper presented at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems AUVS Annual Meeting, Detroit, MI, May, 23-25, 1994.

This paper presents concepts and driving situations to be used in evaluating the control of headway between successive vehicles for automatically controlled and manually controlled surface vehicles. These concepts are based upon relationships between headway range and its time rate of change, range-rate. The paper describes the application of these relationships to evaluations of designs for (1) an autonomous intelligent cruise control system (AICC) for commercial use and (2) a convoy control system for military use. The relationships used for evaluating performance are illustrated in range versus range-rate diagrams. These diagrams display the objectives of headway control, and they may be used in comparing the performance of higher order headway control systems to the response of a fist order headway controller. Performance measures of interest for evaluating the control of headway include deviations from the desired headway and desired. speed during closing in on a preceding vehicle and during following a preceding vehicle, that is, while establishing headway and while maintaining headway. (A)