Cooperative perception in autonomous ground vehicles using a mobile-robot testbed

Autonomous vehicles are limited in their perception capabilities to the field of view of their onboard sensors. Additionally, the environment may not be completely perceivable due to the presence of occlusions and blind spots. To overcome this challenge, wireless vehicle-to-vehicle communication could be employed to send and receive sensory information about the surroundings among vehicles within the vicinity. This form of cooperative perception (CP) turns every vehicle into a moving sensor platform, extending each vehicle's field of view and line of sight. This study proposes one such technique for CP over a short range. The system uses visual and inertial sensors, augmented by a positioning system, to perform cooperative relative localisation between two vehicles that share a common field of view. This allows one vehicle to locate the other vehicle in its frame of reference. Subsequently, information about objects in the field of view of one vehicle, localised using a monocular camera is relayed to the other vehicle through communication. A mobile multi-robot testbed was developed to emulate autonomous vehicles and to experimentally evaluate the proposed method through a series of driving scenario test cases, in which CP could be effective and crucial to the safety and comfort of driving.