Patent ID: 6894605

Claim:
An inter-vehicle control apparatus comprising: accelerating/decelerating means installed on a controlled vehicle for accelerating and decelerating said controlled vehicle, objective recognizing means for calculating at least a relative position and a relative speed of an objective to be recognized with respect to said controlled vehicle, selecting means for selecting a preceding vehicle traveling ahead of said controlled vehicle based on recognition result obtained by said objective recognizing means, inter-vehicle control means for calculating an inter-vehicle control amount based on a difference between an actual inter-vehicle physical amount representing an actual distance between the controlled vehicle and said preceding vehicle selected by said selecting means and a target inter-vehicle physical amount representing a target distance between the selected preceding vehicle and the controlled vehicle, and a relative speed between the controlled vehicle and the selected preceding vehicle, and then actuating said accelerating/decelerating means based on the calculated inter-vehicle control amount, thereby accelerating or decelerating said controlled vehicle so as to maintain an appropriate distance between two traveling vehicles, wherein said inter-vehicle control apparatus further comprises: analyzing means for analyzing the recognition result obtained by said objective recognizing means to judge whether the objective corresponding to said preceding vehicle selected by said selecting means is correctly detected as a vehicle or not; and correcting means for calculating a relative acceleration based on the relative speed calculated by said objective recognizing means only when analysis result of said analyzing means shows properness of said objective as a vehicle, and correcting said inter-vehicle control amount based on the calculated relative acceleration, so that said inter-vehicle control means can control the distance between said preceding vehicle and said controlled vehicle based on the inter-vehicle control amount corrected by said correcting means, wherein said correcting means applies guard processing to the calculated relative acceleration so that the relative acceleration value can be limited by at least one of upper and lower limit values which are determined considering actual relative acceleration of ordinary vehicles, and said correcting means corrects said inter-vehicle control amount based on the relative acceleration being applied the guard processing.