Filippo Ghilotti

Filippo Ghilotti, Edoardo Palladin, Samuel Brucker et al.

Safe highway autonomy for heavy trucks remains an open and unsolved challenge: due to long braking distances, scene understanding of hundreds of meters is required for anticipatory planning and to allow safe braking margins. However, existing driving datasets primarily cover urban scenes, with perception effectively limited to short ranges of only up to 100 meters. To address this gap, we introduce TruckDrive, a highway-scale multimodal driving dataset, captured with a sensor suite purpose-built for long range sensing: seven long-range FMCW LiDARs measuring range and radial velocity, three high-resolution short-range LiDARs, eleven 8MP surround cameras with varying focal lengths and ten 4D FMCW radars. The dataset offers 475 thousands samples with 165 thousands densely annotated frames for driving perception benchmarking up to 1,000 meters for 2D detection and 400 meters for 3D detection, depth estimation, tracking, planning and end to end driving over 20 seconds sequences at highway speeds. We find that state-of-the-art autonomous driving models do not generalize to ranges beyond 150 meters, with drops between 31% and 99% in 3D perception tasks, exposing a systematic long-range gap that current architectures and training signals cannot close.

Filippo Ghilotti, Samuel Brucker, Nahku Saidy et al.

Unlabeled LiDAR logs, in autonomous driving applications, are inherently a gold mine of dense 3D geometry hiding in plain sight - yet they are almost useless without human labels, highlighting a dominant cost barrier for autonomous-perception research. In this work we tackle this bottleneck by leveraging temporal-geometric consistency across LiDAR sweeps to lift and fuse cues from text and 2D vision foundation models directly into 3D, without any manual input. We introduce an unsupervised multi-modal pseudo-labeling method relying on strong geometric priors learned from temporally accumulated LiDAR maps, alongside with a novel iterative update rule that enforces joint geometric-semantic consistency, and vice-versa detecting moving objects from inconsistencies. Our method simultaneously produces 3D semantic labels, 3D bounding boxes, and dense LiDAR scans, demonstrating robust generalization across three datasets. We experimentally validate that our method compares favorably to existing semantic segmentation and object detection pseudo-labeling methods, which often require additional manual supervision. We confirm that even a small fraction of our geometrically consistent, densified LiDAR improves depth prediction by 51.5% and 22.0% MAE in the 80-150 and 150-250 meters range, respectively.

Edoardo Palladin, Samuel Brucker, Filippo Ghilotti et al.

Outside of urban hubs, autonomous cars and trucks have to master driving on intercity highways. Safe, long-distance highway travel at speeds exceeding 100 km/h demands perception distances of at least 250 m, which is about five times the 50-100m typically addressed in city driving, to allow sufficient planning and braking margins. Increasing the perception ranges also allows to extend autonomy from light two-ton passenger vehicles to large-scale forty-ton trucks, which need a longer planning horizon due to their high inertia. However, most existing perception approaches focus on shorter ranges and rely on Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations, which incur quadratic increases in memory and compute costs as distance grows. To overcome this limitation, we built on top of a sparse representation and introduced an efficient 3D encoding of multi-modal and temporal features, along with a novel self-supervised pre-training scheme that enables large-scale learning from unlabeled camera-LiDAR data. Our approach extends perception distances to 250 meters and achieves an 26.6% improvement in mAP in object detection and a decrease of 30.5% in Chamfer Distance in LiDAR forecasting compared to existing methods, reaching distances up to 250 meters. Project Page: https://light.princeton.edu/lrs4fusion/