Periodic Reporting for period 1 - VESAFE (Enhanced 5G Vehicle to Vehicle Technologies for Safe and Reliable Connected Autonomous Vehicles Applications)
Reporting period: 2021-12-09 to 2023-12-08
Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) holds great potentials for road safety and efficiency, but two challenges need to be tackled before its potentials can be fully unleashed: significantly enhanced vehicle to vehicle (eV2V) services and reliable cooperative perception with autonomous vehicles (AV) sensors.
One important technology to improve eV2V is using millimetre wave (mmWave) communications. However, the directional connectivity of mmWave presents new challenges for the whole protocol stack of V2V networks. On the other hand, reliable cooperative perception requires novel design of deep learning (DL) models for object detection and fusion of sensor data from neighbour AVs. As AVs require extremely high safety and reliability, the above challenges underpinned by CAV demand a holistic design and tight integration of connected vehicles (CV) and AV technologies.
This innovative and multi-disciplinary project VESAFE will tackle the key challenges with complementary expertise and realize the full potentials of CAV. A novel cross-layer design is adopted for the research of 5th generation (5G) eV2V schemes with mmWave and reliable cooperative perception for advanced CAV safety applications: the eV2V schemes are AV oriented and greatly assisted by the AV cooperative perception, and the reliable cooperative perception is boosted by the awareness of V2V network conditions.
And this project proposes a novel integrated evaluation of 5G eV2V and CAV applications to support system design and performance characterization.
Through cutting-edge research, this project will produce robust eV2V schemes and reliable cooperative perception solutions, make breakthrough on 5G V2V and CAV safety applications.
It will significantly strengthen knowledge transfer, boost research and innovation (R&I) capacity and quality, therefore contributing to Europe’s competitiveness and growth in the critical 5G/6G and AV sectors.
On the other hand, the reliability of the object detection and tracking is critical for data fusion and cooperative perception, but there is lack of investigation in the existing research from the DL models and data fusion aspects. Furthermore, accurate evaluation and modeling of the V2V, cooperative perception and CAV applications are essential steps for protocol design and performance characterization. While there are increasing efforts on evaluating CAV over real testbeds, the existing works are limited in the scale of performance evaluation and depth of understanding the potential system issues. There is no reported evaluation of advanced CAV applications over 5G V2V. This project will move beyond the SOTA by developing novel reliable cooperative perception solutions with new DL models for object detection and data fusion, and novel integrated simulation of CV and AV safety applications