This paper proposed a real-time method for road-edge detection. The method is named as the mobile equipment based road-edge detection (MERD). Based on the Android platform in the intelligent mobile equipment, MERD combined the mathematical morphology based detection in HSV image with the Hough transform based detection in gray scale image. MERD can be used to provide road-edge detection for various road situations. Experiments are given to show the validity and accuracy of MERD in real-time road-edge detection for the shadowy road, road in the evening, road with snow, road with rain, road with pedestrian and shadows, thus providing the safety insurance for self-driving vehicles.