Honda cruise control system predicts lane cutting behaviour

Honda has announced the world's first predictive cruise control system, which it claims could figure out when a car would cut you up to five seconds before it recombu.com reported.

Honda's Intelligent Adaptive Cruise Control (i-ACC for acronym lovers) deploys a camera and radar to sense the position of other vehicles on the road and a clever algorithm whose working only Honda knew  predicted how likely it was for another car to cross over the driver's lane.

According to Honda this allowed i-ACC to react 'quickly, safely and comfortably', as opposed to the hard application of brakes in a traditional adaptive cruise control system that simply tried to maintain the gap drivers selected between them and the car in front.

An icon appeared on the driver display and mild braking occurred in case a car ventured in front and the anchors then automatically applied harder if the situation required it to keep a safe distance away.

The system is said to be smart enough to know if the car was being driven in the UK or continent and could react accordingly. It also thought it knew when the nearby car most likely to cut one up. Exactly how well i-ACC would work in practice remained to be seen.

Honda created the algorithm after an extensive survey of driving styles, typical in Europe where the system would debut later this year integrated into Honda's European CR-V model, Engineering and Technology magazine reported.

Unlike the existing Adaptive Cruise Control System, which only adjusted speed in order to maintain a safe distance from the car in front, the intelligent system also took into consideration vehicles in parallel lanes.

As against the old system which reacted to only  a sudden cutting-in with a delay, thus requiring abrupt braking, the intelligent upgrade computed the behaviour of the dangerously acting vehicle ahead and provided five seconds for a smoother response.

''i-ACC is a significant breakthrough and a considerable further step towards a new generation of driver assistance systems that anticipate the behaviour of other traffic participants,'' said Jens Schmuedderich, responsible for i-ACC at Honda Research Institute Europe.