V2I based environment perception for autonomous vehicles at intersections

In recent years, autonomous driving technology has made good progress, but the noncooperative intelligence of vehicle for autonomous driving still has many technical bottlenecks when facing urban road autonomous driving challenges. V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) communication is a potential solution to enable cooperative intelligence of vehicles and roads. In this paper, the RGB-PVRCNN, an environment perception framework, is proposed to improve the environmental awareness of autonomous vehicles at intersections by leveraging V2I communication technology. This framework integrates vision feature based on PVRCNN. The normal distributions transform(NDT) point cloud registration algorithm is deployed both on onboard and roadside to obtain the position of the autonomous vehicles and to build the local map objects detected by roadside multi-sensor system are sent back to autonomous vehicles to enhance the perception ability of autonomous vehicles for benefiting path planning and traffic efficiency at the intersection. The field-testing results show that our method can effectively extend the environmental perception ability and range of autonomous vehicles at the intersection and outperform the PointPillar algorithm and the VoxelRCNN algorithm in detection accuracy.