Cooperative Perception of Smart Roadside Unit with Edge AI for Driving Assistance

3D object detection is essential for building autonomous driving perception systems that can detect 3D objects from sensor information and safely plan movement accordingly. Stereo cameras, light detection, and liDAR in existing CAV systems can be heavy and expensive, and have suffered from computing resource limitation, resulting in unavoidable calculation errors or delays that can lead to severe consequences. To address this challenge and provide more reliable real-time localization services for CAVs, C2SMART Center researchers Wei Sun and Chenxi Liu have developed a smart roadside unit (SRSU) with advanced computer vision technologies for driving and parking assistance. Developed by the STAR Lab at UW, the SRSU sensor is a multi-source traffic sensing roadside unit that can transmit data through 4G/5G data plan or Long Range (LoRa) and Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-loT) data communication protocols. Wei and Chenxi will discuss the development and impact of the smart roadside unit, along with a Mobile Unit for Traffic Sensing (MUST) employed for data analysis and for reliable, efficient communication with surrounding vehicles.

Dr. Wei Sun is a research associate in transportation engineering in the Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory (STAR Lab) at the University of Washington (UW). He has a Ph.D. in transportation engineering from the University of Florida (2019) and a bachelor’s degree in transportation engineering from South China University of Technology (2014). Dr. Sun’s active research fields include Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), transportation data analytics, traffic operations and safety, and traffic simulation and software development. Dr. Sun has worked on research projects funded by Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), Center for Safety Equity in Transportation (CSET), and Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans). Dr. Sun serves as reviewers for the Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems: Technology, Planning, and Operations, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Journal of Transportation Engineering, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Smart Cities Conference, and Transportation Research Record (TRR).

Chenxi Liu is a Ph.D. student in the Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory (STAR Lab) at the University of Washington (UW). He received his master’s degree in Civil Engineering from University of Washington (2020) and bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Tsinghua University (2017) in Beijing, China. He came to University of Washington, Seattle, WA, US. in 2017, he has been a Research Assistant in Smart Transportation Research and Application Lab (STARLab). His research interest includes computer vision, deep learning, neural network, and smart transportation facilities.