The recent advancements in communication and computational systems has led to significant improvement of situational awareness in connected and autonomous vehicles. Computationally efficient neural networks and high speed wireless vehicular networks have been some of the main contributors to this improvement. However, scalability and reliability issues caused by inherent limitations of sensory and communication systems are still challenging problems. In this paper, we aim to mitigate the effects of these limitations by introducing the concept of feature sharing for cooperative object detection (FS-COD). In our proposed approach, a better understanding of the environment is achieved by sharing partially processed data between cooperative vehicles while maintaining a balance between computation and communication load. This approach is different from current methods of map sharing, or sharing of raw data which are not scalable. The performance of the proposed approach is verified through experiments on Volony dataset. It is shown that the proposed approach has significant performance superiority over the conventional single-vehicle object detection approaches.
Situational awareness as a necessity in the connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) domain is the subject of a significant number of researches in recent years. The driver's safety is directly dependent on the robustness, reliability, and scalability of such systems. Cooperative mechanisms have provided a solution to improve situational awareness by utilizing high speed wireless vehicular networks. These mechanisms mitigate problems such as occlusion and sensor range limitation. However, the network capacity is a factor determining the maximum amount of information being shared among cooperati…
University of California at Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；Toyota North America R&D Labs（丰田北美研发实验室）
3D object detection plays a fundamental role in enabling autonomous driving, which is regarded as the significant key to unlocking the bottleneck of contemporary transportation systems from the perspectives of safety, mobility, and sustainability. Most of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) object detection methods from point clouds are developed based on a single onboard LiDAR, whose performance will be inevitably limited by the range and occlusion, especially in dense traffic scenarios. In this paper, we propose \textit{PillarGrid}, a novel cooperative perception method fusing information from multi…
In recent years, deep neural networks have achieved high ac-curacy in the field of image recognition. By inspired from human learning method, we propose a semantic segmentation method using cooperative learning which shares the information resembling a group learning. We use two same networks and paths for sending feature maps between two networks. Two networks are trained simultaneously. By sharing feature maps, one of two networks can obtain the information that cannot be obtained by a single network. In addition, in order to enhance the degree of cooperation, we propose two kinds of methods…
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；InfoTech Labs, Toyota Motor North America（丰田汽车北美公司InfoTech实验室）
The recent advancement in computational and communication systems has led to the introduction of high-performing neural networks and high-speed wireless vehicular communication networks. As a result, new technologies such as cooperative perception and cognition have emerged, addressing the inherent limitations of sensory devices by providing solutions for the detection of partially occluded targets and expanding the sensing range. However, designing a reliable cooperative cognition or perception system requires addressing the challenges caused by limited network resources and discrepancies bet…
LiDAR-based 3D object detection, semantic segmentation, and panoptic segmentation are usually implemented in specialized networks with distinctive architectures that are difficult to adapt to each other. This paper presents LidarMultiNet, a LiDAR-based multi-task network that unifies these three major LiDAR perception tasks. Among its many benefits, a multi-task network can reduce the overall cost by sharing weights and computation among multiple tasks. However, it typically underperforms compared to independently combined single-task models. The proposed LidarMultiNet aims to bridge the perfo…
Cooperative perception allows a Connected Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) to interact with the other CAVs in the vicinity to enhance perception of surrounding objects to increase safety and reliability. It can compensate for the limitations of the conventional vehicular perception such as blind spots, low resolution, and weather effects. An effective feature fusion model for the intermediate fusion methods of cooperative perception can improve feature selection and information aggregation to further enhance the perception accuracy. We propose adaptive feature fusion models with trainable feature sele…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Selecting safe landing sites in non-cooperative environments is a key step towards the full autonomy of UAVs. However, the existing methods have the common problems of poor generalization ability and robustness. Their performance in unknown environments is significantly degraded and the error cannot be self-detected and corrected. In this paper, we construct a UAV system equipped with low-cost LiDAR and binocular cameras to realize autonomous landing in non-cooperative environments by detecting the flat and safe ground area. Taking advantage of the non-repetitive scanning and high FOV coverage…
V2X-Radar: A Multi-modal Dataset with 4D Radar for Cooperative Perception
School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（车辆与移动性学院，清华大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；CUMTB（中国交通车辆技术研究所）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；ByteDance（字节跳动）
V2U4Real: A Real-world Large-scale Dataset for Vehicle-to-UAV Cooperative Perception
Fujian Key Laboratory of Urban Intelligent Sensing and Computing, Xiamen University, China（福建省城市智能感知与计算重点实验室，厦门大学，中国）；Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University, China（多媒体可信感知与高效计算教育部重点实验室，厦门大学，中国）
Institute of Cartography and Geo-informatics, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学制图与地理信息研究所）
Sharing collective perception messages (CPM) between vehicles is investigated to decrease occlusions so as to improve the perception accuracy and safety of autonomous driving. However, highly accurate data sharing and low communication overhead is a big challenge for collective perception, especially when real-time communication is required among connected and automated vehicles. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective keypoints-based deep feature fusion framework built on the 3D object detector PV-RCNN, called Fusion PV-RCNN (FPV-RCNN for short), for collective perception. We int…
Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）；AB Volvo（沃尔沃集团）
Recent advances in the field of machine learning and computer vision have enabled the development of fast and accurate road detectors. Commonly such systems are trained within a supervised learning paradigm where both an input sensor's data and the corresponding ground truth label must be provided. The task of generating labels is commonly carried out by human annotators and it is notoriously time consuming and expensive. In this work, it is shown that a semi-supervised approach known as co-training can provide significant F1-score average improvements compared to supervised learning. In co-tr…
HPL-ViT: A Unified Perception Framework for Heterogeneous Parallel LiDARs in V2V
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Waytous Inc.（Waytous公司）；University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Autonomous vehicles may make wrong decisions due to inaccurate detection and recognition. Therefore, an intelligent vehicle can combine its own data with that of other vehicles to enhance perceptive ability, and thus improve detection accuracy and driving safety. However, multi-vehicle cooperative perception requires the integration of real world scenes and the traffic of raw sensor data exchange far exceeds the bandwidth of existing vehicular networks. To the best our knowledge, we are the first to conduct a study on raw-data level cooperative perception for enhancing the detection ability of…
University of California Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Fraunhofer Institute（弗劳恩霍夫研究所）
Modern perception systems of autonomous vehicles are known to be sensitive to occlusions and lack the capability of long perceiving range. It has been one of the key bottlenecks that prevents Level 5 autonomy. Recent research has demonstrated that the Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) cooperative perception system has great potential to revolutionize the autonomous driving industry. However, the lack of a real-world dataset hinders the progress of this field. To facilitate the development of cooperative perception, we present V2V4Real, the first large-scale real-world multi-modal dataset for V2V percep…
V2I-Calib: A Novel Calibration Approach for Collaborative Vehicle and Infrastructure LiDAR Systems
China University of Mining and Technology -Beijing（中国矿业大学（北京））；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
There are many AI tasks involving multiple interacting agents where agents should learn to cooperate and collaborate to effectively perform the task. Here we develop and evaluate various multi-agent protocols to train agents to collaborate with teammates in grid soccer. We train and evaluate our multi-agent methods against a team operating with a smart hand-coded policy. As a baseline, we train agents concurrently and independently, with no communication. Our collaborative protocols were parameter sharing, coordinated learning with communication, and counterfactual policy gradients. Against th…
We present a system for automatic converting of 2D mask object predictions and raw LiDAR point clouds into full 3D bounding boxes of objects. Because the LiDAR point clouds are partial, directly fitting bounding boxes to the point clouds is meaningless. Instead, we suggest that obtaining good results requires sharing information between \emph{all} objects in the dataset jointly, over multiple frames. We then make three improvements to the baseline. First, we address ambiguities in predicting the object rotations via direct optimization in this space while still backpropagating rotation predict…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Sony AI（索尼人工智能）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Optical sensors and learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles have dramatically advanced in the past few years. Nonetheless, the reliability of today's autonomous vehicles is hindered by the limited line-of-sight sensing capability and the brittleness of data-driven methods in handling extreme situations. With recent developments of telecommunication technologies, cooperative perception with vehicle-to-vehicle communications has become a promising paradigm to enhance autonomous driving in dangerous or emergency situations. We introduce COOPERNAUT, an end-to-end learning model that uses cross…
The application of autonomous mobile robots in robotic security platforms is becoming a promising field of innovation due to their adaptive capability of responding to potential disturbances perceived through a wide range of sensors. Researchers have proposed systems that either focus on utilizing a single mobile robot or a system of cooperative multiple robots. However, very few of the proposed works, particularly in the field of multi-robot systems, are completely dependent on LiDAR sensors for achieving various tasks. This is essential when other sensors on a robot fail to provide peak perf…
