iDriving: Toward Safe and Efficient Infrastructure-directed Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving will become pervasive in the coming decades. iDriving improves the safety of autonomous driving at intersections and increases efficiency by improving traffic throughput at intersections. In iDriving, roadside infrastructure remotely drives an autonomous vehicle at an intersection by offloading perception and planning from the vehicle to roadside infrastructure. To achieve this, iDriving must be able to process voluminous sensor data at full frame rate with a tail latency of less than 100 ms, without sacrificing accuracy. We describe algorithms and optimizations that enable it to achieve this goal using an accurate and lightweight perception component that reasons on composite views derived from overlapping sensors, and a planner that jointly plans trajectories for multiple vehicles. In our evaluations, iDriving always ensures safe passage of vehicles, while autonomous driving can only do so 27% of the time. iDriving also results in 5x lower wait times than other approaches because it enables traffic-light free intersections.

ARES: Accurate, Autonomous, Near Real-time 3D Reconstruction using Drones

Drones will revolutionize 3D modeling. A 3D model represents an accurate reconstruction of an object or structure. This paper explores the design and implementation of ARES, which provides near real-time, accurate reconstruction of 3D models using a drone-mounted LiDAR; such a capability can be useful to document construction or check aircraft integrity between flights. Accurate reconstruction requires high drone positioning accuracy, and, because GPS can be in accurate, ARES uses SLAM. However, in doing so it must deal with several competing constraints: drone battery and compute resources, SLAM error accumulation, and LiDAR resolution. ARES uses careful trajectory design to find a sweet spot in this constraint space, a fast reconnaissance flight to narrow the search area for structures, and offloads expensive computations to the cloud by streaming compressed LiDAR data over LTE. ARES reconstructs large structures to within 10s of cms and incurs less than 100 ms compute latency.