WHALES: A Multi-agent Scheduling Dataset for Enhanced Cooperation in Autonomous Driving

Achieving high levels of safety and reliability in autonomous driving remains a critical challenge, especially due to occlusion and limited perception ranges in standalone systems. Cooperative perception among vehicles offers a promising solution, but existing research is hindered by datasets with a limited number of agents. Scaling up the number of cooperating agents is non-trivial and introduces significant computational and technical hurdles that have not been addressed in previous works. To bridge this gap, we present Wireless enHanced Autonomous vehicles with Large number of Engaged agentS (WHALES), a dataset generated using CARLA simulator that features an unprecedented average of 8.4 agents per driving sequence. In addition to providing the largest number of agents and viewpoints among autonomous driving datasets, WHALES records agent behaviors, enabling cooperation across multiple tasks. This expansion allows for new supporting tasks in cooperative perception. As a demonstration, we conduct experiments on agent scheduling task, where the ego agent selects one of multiple candidate agents to cooperate with, optimizing perception gains in autonomous driving. The WHALES dataset and codebase can be found at https://github.com/chensiweiTHU/WHALES.