Driver Friendly Headlight Controller for Driving in Developing Countries

In developing countries, night driving is extremely unsafe mainly due to; 1). Poorly followed traffic rules and 2) bad road conditions. The number of accidents is increasing at a frightening pace, necessitating the development of a low cost automatic headlight control system to ensure safety. In most accident cases, fatal collisions take place due to glare generated by excessive headlight intensity (high beam) of the oncoming vehicle. In this paper, a user friendly controller for headlight intensity control for driving on highway at night has been proposed. Aim is to design simple and affordable system that can alleviate effect of blind spot due to high glare on the vehicle windscreen. Controller is based on Fuzzy inference system (FIS) and used incoming light intensity as criteria. Also, relative distance and speed is derived using incoming intensity of the oncoming vehicles. The system is designed considering human tolerance levels of light intensity as the boundary values. The system controls headlight beam voltage such that; a) intensity is maintained in human visual comfort zone and b) blind spot is avoided. The super user feature incorporated in the intensity controller offers personalized preferences to the driver. Due to the use of the single parameter (intensity) for control, system can be implemented using simplified hardware.