Patent ID: 7289059

Claim:
A method for course prediction in a motor vehicle which has a position-finding system for objects situated in front of the vehicle, the method comprising: on the basis of measured distance and angular data for fixed targets at an edge of a roadway, calculating a function describing a path of a traffic lane; identifying and following a plurality of fixed targets; estimating a path of the roadway with the aid of fixed targets, under the assumption that the fixed targets are situated at the edge of the roadway; and determining a most likely roadway path on the basis of a statistical evaluation of the roadway-edge targets, one plausibility criterion being that at least one parameter of functions describing roadway paths has a significant frequency maximum at a value which corresponds to a real roadway path, wherein, at a beginning of an evaluation, a frequency distribution has a predefined frequency value for all parameters; and reducing frequency values of the parameters, whose functions describe a roadway path on which a fixed target was detected, by a predefined numerical value.