Planning Oriented Integrated Sensing and Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces a planning-oriented ISAC framework that improves autonomous vehicle safety and efficiency by explicitly linking sensing uncertainty to motion planning through a novel safety bound and bilevel optimization.

Contribution

It proposes a new PISAC framework that reduces obstacle sensing uncertainty and integrates it into motion planning via a closed-form safety bound and bilevel optimization.

Findings

Achieves up to 40% higher success rates in urban driving simulations.

Over 5% reduction in traversal times compared to benchmarks.

Effectively balances safety and efficiency in autonomous navigation.

Abstract

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables simultaneous localization, environment perception, and data exchange for connected autonomous vehicles. However, most existing ISAC designs prioritize sensing accuracy and communication throughput, treating all targets uniformly and overlooking the impact of critical obstacles on motion efficiency. To overcome this limitation, we propose a planning-oriented ISAC (PISAC) framework that reduces the sensing uncertainty of planning-bottleneck obstacles and expands the safe navigable path for the ego-vehicle, thereby bridging the gap between physical-layer optimization and motion-level planning. The core of PISAC lies in deriving a closed-form safety bound that explicitly links ISAC transmit power to sensing uncertainty, based on the Cram\'er-Rao Bound and occupancy inflation principles. Using this model, we formulate a bilevel power allocation and motion planning (PAMP) problem, where the inner layer optimizes the ISAC beam power distribution and the outer layer computes a collision-free trajectory under uncertainty-aware safety constraints. Comprehensive simulations in high-fidelity urban driving environments demonstrate that PISAC achieves up to 40% higher success rates and over 5% shorter traversal times than existing ISAC-based and communication-oriented benchmarks, validating its effectiveness in enhancing both safety and efficiency.