A Cooperative Perception Environment for Traffic Operations and Control

TL;DR

This paper develops a cooperative perception system combining infrastructure and CAV sensor data, enhancing traffic data collection efficiency even at low CAV penetration rates, and demonstrates its effectiveness through simulation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cooperative perception environment integrating Lidar data from infrastructure and CAVs for improved traffic management.

Findings

Low CAV and infrastructure sensor penetration achieve performance comparable to higher CV penetration.

The cooperative perception system improves data collection efficiency.

Simulation results validate the system's effectiveness in traffic signal control.

Abstract

Existing data collection methods for traffic operations and control usually rely on infrastructure-based loop detectors or probe vehicle trajectories. Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) not only can report data about themselves but also can provide the status of all detected surrounding vehicles. Integration of perception data from multiple CAVs as well as infrastructure sensors (e.g., LiDAR) can provide richer information even under a very low penetration rate. This paper aims to develop a cooperative data collection system, which integrates Lidar point cloud data from both infrastructure and CAVs to create a cooperative perception environment for various transportation applications. The state-of-the-art 3D detection models are applied to detect vehicles in the merged point cloud. We test the proposed cooperative perception environment with the max pressure adaptive signal control model in a co-simulation platform with CARLA and SUMO. Results show that very low penetration rates of CAV plus an infrastructure sensor are sufficient to achieve comparable performance with 30% or higher penetration rates of connected vehicles (CV). We also show the equivalent CV penetration rate (E-CVPR) under different CAV penetration rates to demonstrate the data collection efficiency of the cooperative perception environment.