Situational awareness using set-based estimation and vehicular communication: An occluded pedestrian-crossing scenario

Abstract

The safety of unprotected road-users is crucial in any urban traffic. Occlusions and blind spots in the field-of-view of a vehicle can lead to unsafe situations. In this work, a specific pedestrian-crossing scenario is considered with an occlusion in the ego-vehicle's field-of-view. A novel framework is presented to enhance situational awareness based on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication to share perception data between vehicle and roadside units. It leverages set-based estimation utilizing a computationally efficient algorithm, for which the pedestrian is guaranteed to be located in a constrained zonotope. The proposed method has been validated through both simulation and real experiments. The real experiments are carried out on a test track using Scania autonomous vehicles.