Patent ID: 7593838

Claim:
A method for a motor vehicle having an adaptive distance and speed control for lane allocation of vehicles on multi-lane roads, by using a model-based lane and misalignment detection, the method comprising: acquiring radar object data from measured data of a radar sensor; filtering the radar object data by at least one of (i) considering only once every object for a lateral displacement histogram, and (ii) considering every object with a weighting, the weighting depending upon how many times an object was detected in individual measurements; registering the filtered data in a lateral displacement histogram, a frequency of the filtered object data being stored in the lateral displacement histogram as a function of the measured lateral displacement of the vehicle's longitudinal axis; correlating an instantaneously determined, current lateral displacement histogram to every stored reference lane model, wherein a result of every correlation from the instantaneous lateral displacement histogram to one of the reference lane models is a correlation result that increases as a similarity of the instantaneous lateral displacement histogram increases as to the reference histogram; selecting the reference histogram having a highest correlation to determine acquired information, which includes a number of lanes, a used lane, and a possible misalignment of the radar sensor; and outputting the acquired information for processing.