CoOpTex: Multimodal Cooperative Perception and Task Execution in Time-Critical Distributed Autonomous System

Integrating multimodal data such as RGB and LiDAR from multiple views significantly increases computational and communication demands, which can be challenging for resource-constrained autonomous agents while meeting the time-critical deadlines required for various mission-critical applications. To address this challenge, we propose CoOpTex, a collaborative task execution framework designed for cooperative perception in distributed autonomous systems (DAS). CoOpTex contribution is twofold: (a) CoOpTex fuses multiview RGB images to create a panoramic camera view for 2D object detection and utilizes 360° LiDAR for 3D object detection, improving accuracy with a lightweight Graph Neural Network (GNN) that integrates object coordinates from both perspectives, (b) To optimize task execution and meet the deadline, CoOpTex dynamically offloads computationally intensive image stitching tasks to auxiliary devices when available and adjusts frame capture rates for RGB frames based on device mobility and processing capabilities. We implement CoOpTex in real-time on static and mobile heterogeneous autonomous agents, which helps to significantly reduce deadline violations by 100% while improving frame rates for 2D detection by $2.2 \times$ in stationary and $2 \times$ in mobile conditions, demonstrating its effectiveness in enabling real-time cooperative perception.