AutoC2X: Open-source software to realize V2X cooperative perception among autonomous vehicles

The realization of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication enhances the capabilities of autonomous vehicles in terms of safety efficiency and comfort. In particular, sensor data sharing, known as cooperative perception, is a crucial technique to accommodate vulnerable road users in a cooperative intelligent transport system (ITS). In this regard, open-source software plays a significant role in prototyping, validation, and deployment. Specifically, in the developer community, Autoware is a popular open-source software for self-driving vehicles, and OpenC2X is an open-source experimental and prototyping platform for cooperative ITS. This paper reports on a system named AutoC2X to enable cooperative perception by using OpenC2X for Autoware-based autonomous vehicles. The developed system is evaluated by conducting field experiments involving real hardware. The results demonstrate that AutoC2X can deliver the cooperative perception message within 100 ms in the worst case.