A Vehicle System for Navigating Among Vulnerable Road Users Including Remote Operation

We present a vehicle system capable of navigating safely and efficiently around Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs), such as pedestrians and cyclists. The system comprises key modules for environment perception, localization and mapping, motion planning, and control, integrated into a prototype vehicle. A key innovation is a motion planner based on Topology-driven Model Predictive Control (T-MPC). The guidance layer generates multiple trajectories in parallel, each representing a distinct strategy for obstacle avoidance or non-passing. The underlying trajectory optimization constrains the joint probability of collision with VRUs under generic uncertainties. To address extraordinary situations ("edge cases") that go beyond the autonomous capabilities - such as construction zones or encounters with emergency responders - the system includes an option for remote human operation, supported by visual and haptic guidance. In simulation, our motion planner outperforms three baseline approaches in terms of safety and efficiency. We also demonstrate the full system in prototype vehicle tests on a closed track, both in autonomous and remotely operated modes.

4D Feet: Registering Walking Foot Shapes Using Attention Enhanced Dynamic-Synchronized Graph Convolutional LSTM Network

4D scans of dynamic deformable human body parts help researchers have a better understanding of spatiotemporal features. However, reconstructing 4D scans based on multiple asynchronous cameras encounters two main challenges: 1) finding the dynamic correspondences among different frames captured by each camera at the timestamps of the camera in terms of dynamic feature recognition, and 2) reconstructing 3D shapes from the combined point clouds captured by different cameras at asynchronous timestamps in terms of multi-view fusion. In this paper, we introduce a generic framework that is able to 1) find and align dynamic features in the 3D scans captured by each camera using the nonrigid iterative closest-farthest points algorithm; 2) synchronize scans captured by asynchronous cameras through a novel ADGC-LSTM-based network, which is capable of aligning 3D scans captured by different cameras to the timeline of a specific camera; and 3) register a high-quality template to synchronized scans at each timestamp to form a high-quality 3D mesh model using a non-rigid registration method. With a newly developed 4D foot scanner, we validate the framework and create the first open-access data-set, namely the 4D feet. It includes 4D shapes (15 fps) of the right and left feet of 58 participants (116 feet in total, including 5147 3D frames), covering significant phases of the gait cycle. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, especially in synchronizing asynchronous 4D scans using the proposed ADGC-LSTM network.