Vision-based flexible leader-follower formation tracking of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots in unknown obstacle environments. IEEE

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.

Understanding and predicting the intention of pedestrians is essential to enable autonomous vehicles and mobile robots to navigate crowds. This problem becomes increasingly complex when we consider the uncertainty and multimodality of pedestrian motion, as well as the implicit interactions between members of a crowd, including any response to a vehicle. Our approach, Probabilistic Crowd GAN, extends recent work in trajectory prediction, combining Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with Mixture Density Networks (MDNs) to output probabilistic multimodal predictions, from which likely modal paths are found and used for adversarial training. We also propose the use of Graph Vehicle-Pedestrian Attention Network (GVAT), which models social interactions and allows input of a shared vehicle feature, showing that inclusion of this module leads to improved trajectory prediction both with and without the presence of a vehicle. Through evaluation on various datasets, we demonstrate improvements on the existing state of the art methods for trajectory prediction and illustrate how the true multimodal and uncertain nature of crowd interactions can be directly modelled.