Demonstrations of Cooperative Perception: Safety and Robustness in Connected and Automated Vehicle Operations

TLDR

Cooperative perception (CP) is an emerging ITS technology that allows ITS stations to share local perception data via V2X, improving road safety and efficiency. This work develops a connected and automated vehicle (CAV) and intelligent roadside unit (IRSU) to demonstrate that CP can enhance vulnerable road user awareness and safety for CAVs across diverse traffic scenarios. The system processes CP messages through coordinate transformation with uncertainty, multi‑user tracking, and CAV path planning, evaluated with a manually driven CV, a fully autonomous CAV, and an IRSU equipped with vision, laser, and tracking sensors. Experiments show a CV can detect pedestrians around corners, and CAVs can autonomously and safely interact with walking and running pedestrians using only CP data, marking one of the first urban vehicle automation demonstrations relying solely on CP.

Abstract

Cooperative perception, or collective perception (CP), is an emerging and promising technology for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). It enables an ITS station (ITS-S) to share its local perception information with others by means of vehicle-to-X (V2X) communication, thereby achieving improved efficiency and safety in road transportation. In this paper, we present our recent progress on the development of a connected and automated vehicle (CAV) and intelligent roadside unit (IRSU). The main contribution of the work lies in investigating and demonstrating the use of CP service within intelligent infrastructure to improve awareness of vulnerable road users (VRU) and thus safety for CAVs in various traffic scenarios. We demonstrate in experiments that a connected vehicle (CV) can “see” a pedestrian around the corners. More importantly, we demonstrate how CAVs can autonomously and safely interact with walking and running pedestrians, relying only on the CP information from the IRSU through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. This is one of the first demonstrations of urban vehicle automation using only CP information. We also address in the paper the handling of collective perception messages (CPMs) received from the IRSU, and passing them through a pipeline of CP information coordinate transformation with uncertainty, multiple road user tracking, and eventually path planning/decision-making within the CAV. The experimental results were obtained with manually driven CV, fully autonomous CAV, and an IRSU retrofitted with vision and laser sensors and a road user tracking system.