Increasing Safety of Automated Driving by Infrastructure-Based Sensors

This paper describes the development of an intelligent infrastructure, a test field, for the safety assurance of automated vehicles within the research project Ingolstadt Innovation Laboratory (IN2Lab). It includes a description of the test field architecture, the RoadSide Units (RSU) concept based on infrastructure-based sensors, the environment perception system, and the mission control system. The study also proposes a global object fusion method to fuse objects detected by different RSUs and investigate the overall measurement accuracy obtained from the usage of different infrastructure-based sensors. Furthermore, it presents four use cases: traffic monitoring, assisted perception, collaborative perception, and extended perception. The traffic monitoring, based on the perception information provided by each roadside unit, generates a global fused object list and monitors the state of the traffic participants. The assisted perception, using vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, broadcasts the state information of the traffic participants to the connected vehicles. The collaborative perception creates a global fused object list with the local detections of connected vehicles and the detections provided by the roadside units, making it available for all connected vehicles. Lastly, the extended environment perception monitors specific locations, recognizes critical scenarios involving vulnerable road users and automated vehicles, and generates a suitable avoidance maneuver to avoid or mitigate the occurrence of collisions.