From Observation to Prediction: LSTM for Vehicle Lane Change Forecasting on Highway On/Off-Ramps

On and off-ramps are understudied road sections even though they introduce a higher level of variation in highway interactions. Predicting vehicles' behavior in these areas can decrease the impact of uncertainty and increase road safety. In this paper, the difference between this Area of Interest (AoI) and a straight highway section is studied. Multi-layered LSTM architecture to train the AoI model with ExiD drone dataset is utilized. In the process, different prediction horizons and different models' workflow are tested. The results show great promise on horizons up to 4 seconds with prediction accuracy starting from about 76% for the AoI and 94% for the general highway scenarios on the maximum horizon.

User-to-Vehicle Interaction in Smart Mobility: The GO-DRiVeS Autonomous Ride-Sharing Application

This paper introduces the GO-DRiVeS application, an on demand ride sharing and requesting mobile application tailored specifically to save long walks and challenges which are time consuming and tiring especially during hot days or when carrying heavy items, faced by university students and staff. The GO-DRiVeS application was developed following the Agile methodology for its flexibility. In addition to, using the mobile application system architecture and client-server architecture. GO-DRiVeS was implemented using React Native (Expo) for the frontend, Node.js and Express for the backend, and MongoDB as the database; based on a detailed analyses to the existing transportation application, comparing their frameworks and identifying their essential functionalities. GO-DRiVeS supports core features like user registration, ride requesting and real-time tracking.In addition to handling multiple requests at the same time in a first come first serve manner. The application was developed based on these features, and the results were conducted in the form of multiple experiments that demonstrated stable behavior in handling the requests, as presented in the Methodology and Results chapters.

From Prompts to Pavement: LMMs-based Agentic Behavior-Tree Generation Framework for Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) require adaptive behavior planners to navigate unpredictable, real-world environments safely. Traditional behavior trees (BTs) offer structured decision logic but are inherently static and demand labor-intensive manual tuning, limiting their applicability at SAE Level 5 autonomy. This paper presents an agentic framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal vision models (LVMs) to generate and adapt BTs on the fly. A specialized Descriptor agent applies chain-of-symbols prompting to assess scene criticality, a Planner agent constructs high-level sub-goals via in-context learning, and a Generator agent synthesizes executable BT sub-trees in XML format. Integrated into a CARLA+Nav2 simulation, our system triggers only upon baseline BT failure, demonstrating successful navigation around unexpected obstacles (e.g., street blockage) with no human intervention. Compared to a static BT baseline, this approach is a proof-of-concept that extends to diverse driving scenarios.

CD-TWINSAFE: A ROS-enabled Digital Twin for Scene Understanding and Safety Emerging V2I Technology

In this paper, the CD-TWINSAFE is introduced, a V2I-based digital twin for Autonomous Vehicles. The proposed architecture is composed of two stacks running simultaneously, an on-board driving stack that includes a stereo camera for scene understanding, and a digital twin stack that runs an Unreal Engine 5 replica of the scene viewed by the camera as well as returning safety alerts to the cockpit. The on-board stack is implemented on the vehicle side including 2 main autonomous modules; localization and perception. The position and orientation of the ego vehicle are obtained using on-board sensors. Furthermore, the perception module is responsible for processing 20-fps images from stereo camera and understands the scene through two complementary pipelines. The pipeline are working on object detection and feature extraction including object velocity, yaw and the safety metrics time-to-collision and time-headway. The collected data form the driving stack are sent to the infrastructure side through the ROS-enabled architecture in the form of custom ROS2 messages and sent over UDP links that ride a 4G modem for V2I communication. The environment is monitored via the digital twin through the shared messages which update the information of the spawned ego vehicle and detected objects based on the real-time localization and perception data. Several tests with different driving scenarios to confirm the validity and real-time response of the proposed architecture.

VIT-Ped: Visionary Intention Transformer for Pedestrian Behavior Analysis

Pedestrian Intention prediction is one of the key technologies in the transition from level 3 to level 4 autonomous driving. To understand pedestrian crossing behaviour, several elements and features should be taken into consideration to make the roads of tomorrow safer for everybody. We introduce a transformer / video vision transformer based algorithm of different sizes which uses different data modalities .We evaluated our algorithms on popular pedestrian behaviour dataset, JAAD, and have reached SOTA performance and passed the SOTA in metrics like Accuracy, AUC and F1-score. The advantages brought by different model design choices are investigated via extensive ablation studies.

Real-World Deployment of a Lane Change Prediction Architecture Based on Knowledge Graph Embeddings and Bayesian Inference

Research on lane change prediction has gained a lot of momentum in the last couple of years. However, most research is confined to simulation or results obtained from datasets, leaving a gap between algorithmic advances and on-road deployment. This work closes that gap by demonstrating, on real hardware, a lane-change prediction system based on Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs) and Bayesian inference. Moreover, the ego-vehicle employs a longitudinal braking action to ensure the safety of both itself and the surrounding vehicles. Our architecture consists of two modules: (i) a perception module that senses the environment, derives input numerical features, and converts them into linguistic categories; and communicates them to the prediction module; (ii) a pretrained prediction module that executes a KGE and Bayesian inference model to anticipate the target vehicle's maneuver and transforms the prediction into longitudinal braking action. Real-world hardware experimental validation demonstrates that our prediction system anticipates the target vehicle's lane change three to four seconds in advance, providing the ego vehicle sufficient time to react and allowing the target vehicle to make the lane change safely.

Small-Scale Testbeds for Connected and Automated Vehicles and Robot Swarms: Challenges and a Roadmap

This article proposes a roadmap to address the current challenges in small-scale testbeds for Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) and robot swarms. The roadmap is a joint effort of participants in the workshop "1st Workshop on Small-Scale Testbeds for Connected and Automated Vehicles and Robot Swarms," held on June 2 at the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV) 2024 in Jeju, South Korea. The roadmap contains three parts: 1) enhancing accessibility and diversity, especially for underrepresented communities, 2) sharing best practices for the development and maintenance of testbeds, and 3) connecting testbeds through an abstraction layer to support collaboration. The workshop features eight invited speakers, four contributed papers [1]-[4], and a presentation of a survey paper on testbeds [5]. The survey paper provides an online comparative table of more than 25 testbeds, available at https://bassamlab.github.io/testbeds-survey. The workshop's own website is available at https://cpm-remote.lrt.unibwmuenchen.de/iv24-workshop.