Vehicles with driving automation are increasingly being developed for deployment across the world. However, the onboard sensing and perception capabilities of such automated or autonomous vehicles (AV) may not be sufficient to ensure safety under all scenarios and contexts. Infrastructure-augmented environment perception using roadside infrastructure sensors can be considered as an effective solution, at least for selected regions of interest such as urban road intersections or curved roads that present occlusions to the AV. However, they incur significant costs for procurement, installation and maintenance. Therefore these sensors must be placed strategically and optimally to yield maximum benefits in terms of the overall safety of road users. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology towards obtaining an optimal placement of V2X (Vehicle-to-everything) infrastructure sensors, which is particularly attractive to urban AV deployments, with various considerations including costs, coverage and redundancy. We combine the latest advances made in raycasting and linear optimization literature to deliver a tool for urban city planners, traffic analysis and AV deployment operators. Through experimental evaluation in representative environments, we prove the benefits and practicality of our approach.
In this paper, we introduce the notion of Cooperative Perception Error Models (coPEMs) towards achieving an effective and efficient integration of V2X solutions within a virtual test environment. We focus our analysis on the occlusion problem in the (onboard) perception of Autonomous Vehicles (AV), which can manifest as misdetection errors on the occluded objects. Cooperative perception (CP) solutions based on Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications aim to avoid such issues by cooperatively leveraging additional points of view for the world around the AV. This approach usually requires many sensors, mainly cameras and LiDARs, to be deployed simultaneously in the environment either as part of the road infrastructure or on other traffic vehicles. However, implementing a large number of sensor models in a virtual simulation pipeline is often prohibitively computationally expensive. Therefore, in this paper, we rely on extending Perception Error Models (PEMs) to efficiently implement such cooperative perception solutions along with the errors and uncertainties associated with them. We demonstrate the approach by comparing the safety achievable by an AV challenged with a traffic scenario where occlusion is the primary cause of a potential collision.
The worldwide development of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) has also encouraged the use of software simulators for virtual testing of AVs. However, the effectiveness of the AV simulators is constrained by numerous challenges, such as their computational cost and lack of fidelity in specific areas. In this paper, we describe the modality of virtual testing and its benefits for AV development and validation. Moreover, we summarize and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art AV simulators, their limitations, and the current directions toward improvement.
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