Infrastructure Assisted Autonomous Driving: Research, Challenges, and Opportunities

Despite advancements in perception technology, achieving full autonomy in vehicles remains challenging partly due to limited situational awareness. Even with their sophisticated sensor arrays, autonomous vehicles often struggle to comprehend complex real-world environments due to the challenges associated with occlusion. A possible solution for addressing this limitation lies in the concept of vehicle-to-infrastructure cooperative driving, which enables vehicles to interact with various sensors implemented in the surrounding infrastructure. The infrastructure can share real-time data, such as traffic conditions, road hazards, and weather updates, facilitating safer and more efficient navigation. Within this framework, cooperative sensing is a crucial component, augmenting the onboard sensing capabilities of autonomous vehicles. Cooperative sensing surpasses traditional onboard sensors by leveraging a shared sensor network among vehicles and infrastructure. This approach mitigates challenges posed by occlusion, where objects are obscured from a vehicle's direct view. By pooling information from multiple sources, autonomous vehicles can gain a more comprehensive understanding of their surroundings, leading to enhanced safety and performance on the road. This study addresses a literature gap regarding information flow from real-world scenes to environmental models for cooperative V2I systems. It explores three core concepts essential for understanding the environment: sensing, perception, and mapping. This paper identifies the specific information required from infrastructure nodes, proposes an optimized sensor suite, discusses data processing algorithms, and investigates effective spatial model representations for cooperative sensing. This research informs the reader about the different challenges and opportunities associated with a V2I cooperative sensing system.