AgentsCoDriver: Large Language Model Empowered Collaborative Driving with Lifelong Learning

Connected and autonomous driving is developing rapidly in recent years. However, current autonomous driving systems, which are primarily based on data-driven approaches, exhibit deficiencies in interpretability, generalization, and continuing learning capabilities. In addition, the single-vehicle autonomous driving systems lack of the ability of collaboration and negotiation with other vehicles, which is crucial for the safety and efficiency of autonomous driving systems. In order to address these issues, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to develop a novel framework, AgentsCoDriver, to enable multiple vehicles to conduct collaborative driving. AgentsCoDriver consists of five modules: observation module, reasoning engine, cognitive memory module, reinforcement reflection module, and communication module. It can accumulate knowledge, lessons, and experiences over time by continuously interacting with the environment, thereby making itself capable of lifelong learning. In addition, by leveraging the communication module, different agents can exchange information and realize negotiation and collaboration in complex traffic environments. Extensive experiments are conducted and show the superiority of AgentsCoDriver.

SmartCooper: Vehicular Collaborative Perception with Adaptive Fusion and Judger Mechanism

In recent years, autonomous driving has garnered significant attention due to its potential for improving road safety through collaborative perception among connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). However, time-varying channel variations in vehicular transmission environments demand dynamic allocation of communication resources. Moreover, in the context of collaborative perception, it is important to recognize that not all CAVs contribute valuable data, and some CAV data even have detrimental effects on collaborative perception. In this paper, we introduce SmartCooper, an adaptive collaborative perception framework that incorporates communication optimization and a judger mechanism to facilitate CAV data fusion. Our approach begins with optimizing the connectivity of vehicles while considering communication constraints. We then train a learnable encoder to dynamically adjust the compression ratio based on the channel state information (CSI). Subsequently, we devise a judger mechanism to filter the detrimental image data reconstructed by adaptive decoders. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm on the OpenCOOD platform. Our results demonstrate a substantial reduction in communication costs by 23.10\% compared to the non-judger scheme. Additionally, we achieve a significant improvement on the average precision of Intersection over Union (AP@IoU) by 7.15\% compared with state-of-the-art schemes.

Collaborative Perception for Connected and Autonomous Driving: Challenges, Possible Solutions and Opportunities

Autonomous driving has attracted significant attention from both academia and industries, which is expected to offer a safer and more efficient driving system. However, current autonomous driving systems are mostly based on a single vehicle, which has significant limitations which still poses threats to driving safety. Collaborative perception with connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) shows a promising solution to overcoming these limitations. In this article, we first identify the challenges of collaborative perception, such as data sharing asynchrony, data volume, and pose errors. Then, we discuss the possible solutions to address these challenges with various technologies, where the research opportunities are also elaborated. Furthermore, we propose a scheme to deal with communication efficiency and latency problems, which is a channel-aware collaborative perception framework to dynamically adjust the communication graph and minimize latency, thereby improving perception performance while increasing communication efficiency. Finally, we conduct experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

Towards Full-scene Domain Generalization in Multi-agent Collaborative Bird's Eye View Segmentation for Connected and Autonomous Driving

Collaborative perception has recently gained significant attention in autonomous driving, improving perception quality by enabling the exchange of additional information among vehicles. However, deploying collaborative perception systems can lead to domain shifts due to diverse environmental conditions and data heterogeneity among connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). To address these challenges, we propose a unified domain generalization framework applicable in both training and inference stages of collaborative perception. In the training phase, we introduce an Amplitude Augmentation (AmpAug) method to augment low-frequency image variations, broadening the model's ability to learn across various domains. We also employ a meta-consistency training scheme to simulate domain shifts, optimizing the model with a carefully designed consistency loss to encourage domain-invariant representations. In the inference phase, we introduce an intra-system domain alignment mechanism to reduce or potentially eliminate the domain discrepancy among CAVs prior to inference. Comprehensive experiments substantiate the effectiveness of our method in comparison with the existing state-of-the-art works. Code will be released at https://github.com/DG-CAVs/DG-CoPerception.git.