Pillar-Based Cooperative Perception from Point Clouds for 6G-Enabled Cooperative Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

3D object detection is a significant aspect of the perception module in autonomous driving; however, with current technology, data sharing between vehicles and cloud servers for cooperative 3D object detection under the strict latency requirement is limited by the communication bandwidth. The sixth-generation (6G) networks have accelerated the transmission rate of the sensor data significantly with extreme low-latency and high-speed data transmission. However, which sensor data format and when to transmit it are still challenging. To address these issues, this study proposes a cooperative perception framework combined with a pillar-based encoder and Octomap-based compression at edges for connected autonomous vehicles to reduce the amount of missing detection in blind spots and further distances. This approach satisfies the constraints on the accuracy of the task perception and provides drivers or autonomous vehicles with sufficient reaction time by applying fixed encoders to learn a representation of point clouds (LiDAR sensor data). Extensive experiment results show that the proposed approach outperforms the previous cooperative perception schemes running at 30 Hz, and the accuracy of the object bounding box results in further distances (greater than 12 m). Furthermore, this approach achieves a lower total delay for the procession of the fusion data and the transmission of the cooperative perception message. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to introduce a pillar-based encoder and Octomap-based compression framework for cooperative perception between vehicles and edges in connected autonomous driving.