SGCP: A Self-Organized Game-Theoretic Framework For Collaborative Perception

TL;DR

This paper presents a decentralized game-theoretic framework enabling autonomous vehicles to self-organize into cooperative groups for efficient, bandwidth-aware collaborative perception, significantly improving safety and perception accuracy in dense traffic.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel self-organized, fully decentralized framework for vehicle collaboration using game theory, reducing communication needs and enhancing perception in autonomous driving.

Findings

Reduces communication overhead compared to baselines

Improves perception accuracy in dense traffic scenarios

Enables scalable, infrastructure-free vehicle cooperation

Abstract

Collaborative perception holds great promise for improving safety in autonomous driving, particularly in dense traffic where vehicles can share sensory information to overcome individual blind spots and extend awareness. However, deploying such collaboration at scale remains difficult when communication bandwidth is limited and no roadside infrastructure is available. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a fully decentralized framework that enables vehicles to self organize into cooperative groups using only vehicle to vehicle communication. The approach decomposes the problem into two sequential game theoretic stages. In the first stage, vehicles form stable clusters by evaluating mutual sensing complementarity and motion coherence, and each cluster elects a coordinator. In the second stage, the coordinator guides its members to selectively transmit point cloud segments from perceptually salient regions through a non cooperative potential game, enabling efficient local fusion. Global scene understanding is then achieved by exchanging compact detection messages across clusters rather than raw sensor data. We design distributed algorithms for both stages that guarantee monotonic improvement of the system wide potential function. Comprehensive experiments on the CARLA-OpenCDA-NS3 co-simulation platform show that our method reduces communication overhead while delivering higher perception accuracy and wider effective coverage compared to existing baselines.