Analysis of Efficient Transmission Methods of Grid Maps for Intelligent Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper proposes a patch-based communication pipeline utilizing compression algorithms to efficiently transmit grid maps for intelligent vehicles, addressing large data size issues in intra-vehicle and V2X communications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel patch-based transmission method that leverages compression algorithms to reduce grid map data size for vehicle communication systems.

Findings

The pipeline effectively reduces data size for intra-vehicle communication.

It improves transmission efficiency for V2X applications.

Guidelines for efficient grid map data transmission are summarized.

Abstract

Grid mapping is a fundamental approach to modeling the environment of intelligent vehicles or robots. Compared with object-based environment modeling, grid maps offer the distinct advantage of representing the environment without requiring any assumptions about objects, such as type or shape. For grid-map-based approaches, the environment is divided into cells, each containing information about its respective area, such as occupancy. This representation of the entire environment is crucial for achieving higher levels of autonomy. However, it has the drawback that modeling the scene at the cell level results in inherently large data sizes. Patched grid maps tackle this issue to a certain extent by adapting cell sizes in specific areas. Nevertheless, the data sizes of patched grid maps are still too large for novel distributed processing setups or vehicle-to-everything (V2X) applications. Our work builds on a patch-based grid-map approach and investigates the size problem from a communication perspective. To address this, we propose a patch-based communication pipeline that leverages existing compression algorithms to transmit grid-map data efficiently. We provide a comprehensive analysis of this pipeline for both intra-vehicle and V2X-based communication. The analysis is verified for these use cases with two real-world experiment setups. Finally, we summarize recommended guidelines for the efficient transmission of grid-map data in intelligent transportation systems.