Cooperation of V2I/P2I Communication and Roadside Radar Perception for the Safety of Vulnerable Road Users

Multiple means have been proposed to enhance safety for vulnerable road users (VRUs), especially pedestrians. V2X communication, including vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P), and roadside sensor perception are two such approaches. V2X communication requires communication devices and is not applicable to VRUs not carrying such a device. On the other hand, for specific areas such as an intersection roadside sensors are getting installed and operable for surveillance purpose. So we investigate the cooperation of the two approaches at an intersection. A 79GHz millimeter radar is used as the roadside sensor to detect vehicles and pedestrians including those without V2X communication ability, while V2I/P2I (pedestrian-to-infrastructure) communication is utilized to assist the radar to recognize hidden vehicles and pedestrians blocked by buildings. In the paper, we first introduce our developed V2P communication and 79GHz radar systems, and then consider object identification and selection based on fusing perception data and communication data. As a new function we also investigate action prediction and collision prediction for pedestrians. Our system is experimented with field tests and the cooperation performance is verified.