A Grid-Based Framework for Collective Perception in Autonomous Vehicles

Today, perception solutions for Automated Vehicles rely on sensors on board the vehicle, which are limited by the line of sight and occlusions caused by any other elements on the road. As an alternative, Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications allow vehicles to cooperate and enhance their perception capabilities. Besides announcing its own presence and intentions, services such as Collective Perception (CPS) aim to share information about perceived objects as a high-level description. This work proposes a perception framework for fusing information from on-board sensors and data received via CPS messages (CPM). To that end, the environment is modeled using an occupancy grid where occupied, and free and uncertain space is considered. For each sensor, including V2X, independent grids are calculated from sensor measurements and uncertainties and then fused in terms of both occupancy and confidence. Moreover, the implementation of a Particle Filter allows the evolution of cell occupancy from one step to the next, allowing for object tracking. The proposed framework was validated on a set of experiments using real vehicles and infrastructure sensors for sensing static and dynamic objects. Results showed a good performance even under important uncertainties and delays, hence validating the viability of the proposed framework for Collective Perception.