Towards Cooperative Perception Services for ITS: Digital Twin in the Automotive Edge Cloud

Abstract

We demonstrate a working functional prototype of a cooperative perception system that maintains a real-time digital twin of the traffic environment, providing a more accurate and more reliable model than any of the participant subsystems—in this case, smart vehicles and infrastructure stations—would manage individually. The importance of such technology is that it can facilitate a spectrum of new derivative services, including cloud-assisted and cloud-controlled ADAS functions, dynamic map generation with analytics for traffic control and road infrastructure monitoring, a digital framework for operating vehicle testing grounds, logistics facilities, etc. In this paper, we constrain our discussion on the viability of the core concept and implement a system that provides a single service: the live visualization of our digital twin in a 3D simulation, which instantly and reliably matches the state of the real-world environment and showcases the advantages of real-time fusion of sensory data from various traffic participants. We envision this prototype system as part of a larger network of local information processing and integration nodes, i.e., the logically centralized digital twin is maintained in a physically distributed edge cloud.

Performance Evaluation of Onboard Processing Capability Reduction in Cooperative Vehicles Using 5G and Artificial Intelligence

“…Algorithms such as You Only Look Once (YOLO) use these data to implement three-dimensional (3D) object detection functionality. Tis enables trafc safety monitoring and driving assistance, all within 5G-based scenarios [45,46].…”

A Systematic Mapping Study of Digital Twins for Diagnosis in Transportation

“…Some digital twins failed to match any of the previously mentioned categories by means of subject matching. These concern an "environment" or "traffic" itself, and are used to estimate traffic [84], estimating speed and volume of traffic [79], or detecting pedestrians [76], [77] and vehicles [77].…”

“…Thirdly, digital twins raise some issues regarding privacy and security, some of which have already been pointed out in prior work [5], [7], [14], [17]. Few papers discuss these issues, and those that do contain a wide variety of statements from claims that edge computing or blockchain provide necessary levels of security or privacy [84], [89], [102] over other potential solutions within their specific application [93] to delegations towards future work [28], [76], [105] and mere acknowledgments [49], [81], [85].…”

Digital Twins in the Automotive Industry: The Road toward Physical-Digital Convergence

“…Used in the design of new products as well in the production lines. At the same time and after the completion of the product manufacturing, it can measure specific patterns and functional information of the vehicle with the purpose of aiding in its performance increase [28][29][30][31].…”