Patent ID: 8548664

Claim:
An autonomic traveling apparatus for a vehicle comprising: a vehicle position obtaining unit that obtains the current position of a traveling vehicle; a lane information storage that stores links of lane traveled by the vehicle; a travel controller that causes the vehicle to travel toward end coordinates of the link being currently traveled by the vehicle, the end coordinates being regarded as a destination for the vehicle; a transceiver that communicates with a travel administration center; an obstacle-on-lane detector that checks the link to determine whether a obstacle exists on the link; and a road condition detector that checks a condition of a surface of lanes including crossover lanes near the traveling vehicle and determines that the lane is in a good condition, wherein the lane information storage stores coordinates of start and end points of the links representing shapes of lanes with respect to an independent travel lane which vehicles travel at high speeds, pass-by lanes which vehicles travel when the vehicles pass by other vehicles and the crossover lanes which vehicles travel when the vehicles change their course from the independent travel lane to the pass-by lanes, and also stores the road conditions of crossover lanes for each link; the transceiver notifies a travel administration center of the road condition of the crossover lanes detected by the road condition detector and a current position of the traveling vehicle, and receives from the travel administration center the result of the measurement of road condition of the crossover lanes; when the vehicle receives a command from the travel administration center to enter the pass-by lane, the transceiver receives information on the available crossover lanes with good road condition from the travel administration center and stores the information about the crossover lanes with good road condition into a database of the vehicle; and the travel controller causes the vehicle to change its course to the pass-by lane via the crossover lane with good road condition based on stored information in the database after the obstacle-on-lane detector determines that the crossover lane with good road condition is free of an obstacle.