Ford Global Technolgoies, LLC

Craig Schmatz

Roger Arnold Trombley

Luke Niewiadomski

Li Xu

Donald Jacob Mattern

Seyed Armin Raeis Hosseiny

Arnav Sharma

A system for assisting in aligning a vehicle for hitching with a trailer includes a controller that receives the scene data and identifying the trailer within the area to the rear of the vehicle, derives a backing path to align a hitch ball mounted on the vehicle to a coupler of the trailer, outputting a powertrain control signal to the vehicle powertrain control system, and a brake control signal to the vehicle brake system to maneuver the vehicle, including reversing along the backing path and stopping the vehicle at an endpoint of the path, and outputs a video image to the vehicle human-machine interface including a graphical overlay on the image data. The graphical overlay indicates potential movement of the hitch ball past the coupler and being positioned in the image data between a bumper of the vehicle and the hitch ball.

Growing community of inventors

Birmingham, MI, United States of America

Craig Schmatz