Open Pilot uses a smartphone to enable your car to achieve LEVEL 2 autonomous drive

===> https://sites.google.com/a/ee.ccu.edu.tw/neatlab/air-quality-pm2-5-kong-qi-pin-zhilora-ce-shi-test/openpilot?pli=1

Retrofit your old car into level 2 car!

https://zoneos.com/galant/ https://openmechanics.github.io/

https://github.com/Lukilink/openpilot/blob/old_cars/README.md

20190902

** AFAIK the latest 0.6.3 openpilot supports 'vision radar' can output the lead car distance by its internal camera, so should be a good replacement for people trying aftermarket ACC without FMCW radar!! 

YouTube Video

  

YouTube Video

** Comma Pedal (google it if you do not know about it) can also use to replace my modification of 'cruise control switch' approach with more 'smooth' acceleration/slow down.

==============

2019-12-11  check this great old car openpilot project here! a lot useful information

https://github.com/Lukilink/openpilot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1u6AkSpR98

==============

YouTube 影片

The latest version: homemade ACC with FMCW radar + CC control

This story began as the Taiwanese Toyota does not offer ACC option for Carmy Hybrid in 2012. Even more, ridiculously, Taiwanese Toyota only offered 2 air bags in the entry-level Camry Hybrid, can you believe it happens in Taiwan? Even I want to buy a new Toyota/Lexus hybrid car with full-range ACC, the fact is these is not such option in Taiwan now. Instead of buying a pricey new car with limited ACC for >40 KPH only, why design a homemade ACC for all the old cars?  This is a good idea to sell such aftermarket kit for old car. I contacted with some aftermarket CC kit manufactures but no one replied tome, so I decide to design my own kit. 

Actually, it is not impossible. Modern car with cruise control is possible to integrate ACC function without modifying the throttle & brake pedal. On highway, you may try to maintain your car speed with purely cruise control switch (plus and minus switch) then you may notice it is possible to keep ahead car distance without touching throttle pedal and brake pedal. Based on this idea, I follow up many previous studies results (find the reference list in this page below); some prototypes were implemented. In order to build an aftermarket ACC, several issues are needed to solve. 

1. The first is how to measure the ahead car distance reliably, considering harsh weather conditions, curve roads & detect lane marks, etc, and fuse all data together?
2. The second, how to control your car speed without adding additional servo motors and hack into your car computers?
3. The third is how to design a good algorithm to control the car smoothly with limited sensor information (sometimes the sensors are very unreliable, filtering is necessary). Again, sensor fusion is a key issue.

For first issue, I tried a camera solution from a Chinese company which kindly provided me the protocol to read their ADAS camera to know the TTC (time to collide) of the ahead car. This works but very unreliable in bad weather condition and while the ahead car is far, but for short-distance < 20m camera is good. 

 

I turn out seeking FMCW radar solutions from Continental/Bosch/Delphi/TI, but the high price (> 1000~2000 USD each) and limited protocol can be accessed as I am not a big car company again prohibited me to use their solutions. Eventually a Chinese company ( website: mwradar.com ) offered me a FMCW radar at relative inexpensive price, which is specially design for doing FCW (front collision warning) system. I converted it into for measuring ahead car distance. This company kindly provided me part of the radar protocol on CAN bus so I can read some information about the ahead car, including distance in two dimension and velocities, although not very accurate and some issues still existed, this FMCW radar is much reliable while measuring cars in long distance (< 70m is reliable, and up to 140m is possible).

The second point current I use the cruise control (CC) switch to control my car speed. Refer to the following figure the signal of CC control switch is generated by applying different resistances while you pressing different CC keys. I use relays to simulate the keys to send speed up/down signal to the car. The advantage is that only need to wired two wires from CC, and is possible to apply to all old cars with CC. The future plans to build robotic fingers to simulate human to manipulate CC switches, so no intrusion to the wires of the car will be made. By this way, we can easily apply this system to ALL the existing old cars. 

The third, I think could be one of the difficult parts, is how to control the car smoothly with only CC. The current design is based on TTC to control and keep the ahead car distance, i.e., maintain the car distance as TTC at 2.1 seconds. This is decent as the two prototypes were used this approach. So if your car runs at 110 kph the TTC = 2.1 s then the distance is 70 m, and will drop to 23.3 m if the speed is 40 kph. Now I am trying to fine-tune the algorithm to control the car. Maybe some AI / Machine learning should be added in this design to build a self-calibrate /learn system.

 

As this is a private hobby project, I am looking for any possible support to this idea. I will release the design once the first stable release is done. 

figure: TTC vs ahead car distance vs my car KPH 

2018-1-7 I got two FMCW radars, TI AWR1642BOOST & Smartmicro.de FMCW radar. Now AWR1642BOOST is work, but need additional efforts to make it into a product-like radar(considering object clustering algorithm, integrating CANBUS, reliability issue, weather-proof).

** I am looking for any devices that can output the distance from the front car to my car, no matter it is radar based or camera based system. Please let me know if you can provide this device for the experiment. huclee.nthu@gmail.com

The FMCW radar at the front grill

The CANBUS reader for the FMCW radar

This version of homemade ACC is a modification to my Toyota Camry Hybrid 2012. The info of the LCD --

CLOSE -- too close, slow down my car now

GOOD -- current distance is good, keep the speed

FAR -- the front car is far, speed up now

T-FAR -- the front car is too far, the user need to take control the gas

The bar indicate the desire distance for three level SHORT/MIDDLE/LONG

The "S" indicates my car's speed in kph

L: first number is the front car distance in m, the second number is my car's speed in meter per second

ACC ON/OFF indicates the current system is on or off.

The FMCW radar can detect the front car at most more than 140 meter on the current installation. But for stable tracking the front car, less than 70 meters is much better.