Process for detecting the road conditions ahead for motor vehicles

Claim 1

A process for recognizing the course of the road ahead for a motor vehicle, the process comprising the steps of; determining the velocity of the motor vehicle; determining the position and velocity of objects located ahead of the vehicle by a radar sensor system with rigidly oriented antennas; separating fixed objects out of the objects located ahead of the vehicle, said separating being performed in a plurality of discrete angle ranges; determining current distances between a side of the road and the motor vehicle from the fixed objects and using the determined current distances as characteristics for a nonlinear regression; determining the objects which are specific of the side of the road from among the fixed objects in the discrete angle ranges by a threshold value comparison of radar target amplitudes; filtering, with an ordering filter, the object with a shortest distance out of the roadside-specific objects determined in each of the discrete angle ranges over a plurality of consecutive measurement cycles; using the filtered object from said ordering filter to determine the distance between the side of the road and the motor vehicle in each of the discrete angle range; and using the objects determined in the discrete angle ranges as characteristics for an adaptive prediction of a curve type using a curve classifier.