A Study on Automatic Compensation for Head Lamps Cut-off Line Under Load Variation

Vehicle lightings are very important for safe driving during night time. Since the eye recovery time after an exposure to oncoming headlights would take after several seconds, the aiming point of vehicle head lamps have to pass safety requirements. Despite the fact that vehicle inclination is variable with vehicle load conditions, the head lamps aiming point is usually fixed at a constant position which is set by car manufacturer. Consequently, vehicle head lamps under varying load conditions often make people in the opposing vehicle uncomfortable, and even worse, can cause an accident. This paper presents an active vehicle lighting mechanism to automatically adjust its aiming point, or cut-off line, in order to compensate the change in vehicle inclination resulting from load variations. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through a set of simulations and experiments with a real vehicle.