Toward Collaborative Autonomous Driving: Simulation Platform and End-to-End System

Abstract

Vehicle-to-everything-aided autonomous driving (V2X-AD) has a huge potential to provide a safer driving solution. Despite extensive research in transportation and communication to support V2X-AD, the actual utilization of these infrastructures and communication resources in enhancing driving performances remains largely unexplored. This highlights the necessity of collaborative autonomous driving; that is, a machine learning approach that optimizes the information sharing strategy to improve the driving performance of each vehicle. This effort necessitates two key foundations: a platform capable of generating data to facilitate the training and testing of V2X-AD, and a comprehensive system that integrates full driving-related functionalities with mechanisms for information sharing. From the platform perspective, we present V2Xverse, a comprehensive simulation platform for collaborative autonomous driving. This platform provides a complete pipeline for collaborative driving: multi-agent driving dataset generation scheme, codebase for deploying full-stack collaborative driving systems, closed-loop driving performance evaluation with scenario customization. From the system perspective, we introduce CoDriving, a novel end-to-end collaborative driving system that properly integrates V2X communication over the entire autonomous pipeline, promoting driving with shared perceptual information. The core idea is a novel driving-oriented communication strategy, that is, selectively complementing the driving-critical regions in single-view using sparse yet informative perceptual cues. Leveraging this strategy, CoDriving improves driving performance while optimizing communication efficiency. We make comprehensive benchmarks with V2Xverse, analyzing both modular performance and closed-loop driving performance. Experimental results show that CoDriving: i) significantly improves the driving score by 62.49% and drastically reduces the pedestrian collision rate by 53.50% compared to the SOTA end-to-end driving method, and ii) achieves sustaining driving performance superiority over dynamic constraint communication conditions.