Program to control acceleration of a car

Hello, I am trying to create a program to control the acceleration of a car. The car has accelerate up to the speed limit or the car in front of it, which ever is slower and decelerate to avoid a collision if necessary. There are comfortable limits for deceleration and acceleration.

The first test case is the simplest and involves accelerating up to meet a car and then following it. I can get up behind it, but my acceleration and deceleration oscillate extremely. The graph of acceleration bounces back forth between the max and min acceleration..

How can I fix this?

if true
  % code
  % D(n) is the distance to the car in front at time n
  % VL is the velocity of the lead car
  % V(n) is the velocity of the car at time n

    if D(n)>(8*V(n))              % accel comfortably until within 8sec of car in front
            a=AccelLimit;                   
    elseif(VL-V(n))<0             
            a= min((100/((D(n))))*((VL-V(n))/dt),AccelLimit);% if the car in front is going slower, we want our deceleration to be proportional to diff in VL-V(n) and inverse to D(n)
        elseif D(n)<1                           
            a=DecelLimit;
        else
            a=min((0.01*(D(n))*((VL-V(n))/dt)),DecelLimit);         % if the car in front is going faser, we want our acceleration to be proportional to D(n) and VL-V(n)

        end
  end

Thanks!

[Jon Boerner]

Hi Ryan,

Could you post enough code so we can see the behavior you are talking about? For example, I would imagine you have a loop and some variable definitions. It would be a lot easier to take a look if you did that.