End-to-End Multimodal Sensor Dataset Collection Framework for Autonomous Vehicles.

Autonomous driving vehicles rely on sensors for the robust perception of their surroundings. Such vehicles are equipped with multiple perceptive sensors with a high level of redundancy to ensure safety and reliability in any driving condition. However, multi-sensor, such as camera, LiDAR, and radar systems raise requirements related to sensor calibration and synchronization, which are the fundamental blocks of any autonomous system. On the other hand, sensor fusion and integration have become important aspects of autonomous driving research and directly determine the efficiency and accuracy of advanced functions such as object detection and path planning. Classical model-based estimation and data-driven models are two mainstream approaches to achieving such integration. Most recent research is shifting to the latter, showing high robustness in real-world applications but requiring large quantities of data to be collected, synchronized, and properly categorized. However, there are two major research gaps in existing works: (i) they lack fusion (and synchronization) of multi-sensors, camera, LiDAR and radar; and (ii) generic scalable, and user-friendly end-to-end implementation. To generalize the implementation of the multi-sensor perceptive system, we introduce an end-to-end generic sensor dataset collection framework that includes both hardware deploying solutions and sensor fusion algorithms. The framework prototype integrates a diverse set of sensors, such as camera, LiDAR, and radar. Furthermore, we present a universal toolbox to calibrate and synchronize three types of sensors based on their characteristics. The framework also includes the fusion algorithms, which utilize the merits of three sensors, namely, camera, LiDAR, and radar, and fuse their sensory information in a manner that is helpful for object detection and tracking research. The generality of this framework makes it applicable in any robotic or autonomous applications and suitable for quick and large-scale practical deployment.

Lidar-Camera Semi-Supervised Learning for Semantic Segmentation.

In this work, we investigated two issues: (1) How the fusion of lidar and camera data can improve semantic segmentation performance compared with the individual sensor modalities in a supervised learning context; and (2) How fusion can also be leveraged for semi-supervised learning in order to further improve performance and to adapt to new domains without requiring any additional labelled data. A comparative study was carried out by providing an experimental evaluation on networks trained in different setups using various scenarios from sunny days to rainy night scenes. The networks were tested for challenging, and less common, scenarios where cameras or lidars individually would not provide a reliable prediction. Our results suggest that semi-supervised learning and fusion techniques increase the overall performance of the network in challenging scenarios using less data annotations.

A cross-country comparison of user experience of public autonomous transport.

Autonomous solutions for transportation are emerging worldwide, and one of the sectors that will benefit the most from these solutions is the public transport by shifting toward the new paradigm of Mobility as a Service (MaaS). Densely populated areas cannot afford an increase in individual transportation due to space limitation, congestion, and pollution. Working towards more effective and inclusive mobility in public areas, this paper compares user experiences of autonomous public transport across Baltic countries, with the final goal of gaining an increased insight into public needs. User experience was evaluated through questionnaires gathered along pilot projects implementing a public transportation line, using an automated electric minibus between 2018 and 2019. To have sufficient diversity in the data, the pilot projects were implemented in several cities in the Baltic Sea Area. The data analysed in this paper specifically refer to the cities of Helsinki (Finland), Tallinn (Estonia), Kongsberg (Norway), and Gdansk (Poland). Across all cities, passengers provided remarkably positive feedback regarding personal security and safety onboard. The overall feedback, which was very positive in general, showed statistically significant differences across the groups of cities (Kongsberg, Helsinki, Tallinn and Gdansk), partially explicable by the differences in the route design. In addition, across all cities and feedback topics, males gave a lower score compared to females. The overall rating suggests that there is a demand for future last-mile automated services that could be integrated with the MaaS concept, although demand changes according to socio-economic and location-based conditions across different countries. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12544-021-00477-3.