Majid Khonji

Mohamed Nagy, Majid Khonji, Jorge Dias et al.

Persistent multi-object tracking (MOT) allows autonomous vehicles to navigate safely in highly dynamic environments. One of the well-known challenges in MOT is object occlusion when an object becomes unobservant for subsequent frames. The current MOT methods store objects information, like objects' trajectory, in internal memory to recover the objects after occlusions. However, they retain short-term memory to save computational time and avoid slowing down the MOT method. As a result, they lose track of objects in some occlusion scenarios, particularly long ones. In this paper, we propose DFR-FastMOT, a light MOT method that uses data from a camera and LiDAR sensors and relies on an algebraic formulation for object association and fusion. The formulation boosts the computational time and permits long-term memory that tackles more occlusion scenarios. Our method shows outstanding tracking performance over recent learning and non-learning benchmarks with about 3% and 4% margin in MOTA, respectively. Also, we conduct extensive experiments that simulate occlusion phenomena by employing detectors with various distortion levels. The proposed solution enables superior performance under various distortion levels in detection over current state-of-art methods. Our framework processes about 7,763 frames in 1.48 seconds, which is seven times faster than recent benchmarks. The framework will be available at https://github.com/MohamedNagyMostafa/DFR-FastMOT.

Majid Khonji, Rashid Alyassi, Wolfgang Merkt et al.

In transportation networks, where traffic lights have traditionally been used for vehicle coordination, intersections act as natural bottlenecks. A formidable challenge for existing automated intersections lies in detecting and reasoning about uncertainty from the operating environment and human-driven vehicles. In this paper, we propose a risk-aware intelligent intersection system for autonomous vehicles (AVs) as well as human-driven vehicles (HVs). We cast the problem as a novel class of Multi-agent Chance-Constrained Stochastic Shortest Path (MCC-SSP) problems and devise an exact Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation that is scalable in the number of agents' interaction points (e.g., potential collision points at the intersection). In particular, when the number of agents within an interaction point is small, which is often the case in intersections, the ILP has a polynomial number of variables and constraints. To further improve the running time performance, we show that the collision risk computation can be performed offline. Additionally, a trajectory optimization workflow is provided to generate risk-aware trajectories for any given intersection. The proposed framework is implemented in CARLA simulator and evaluated under a fully autonomous intersection with AVs only as well as in a hybrid setup with a signalized intersection for HVs and an intelligent scheme for AVs. As verified via simulations, the featured approach improves intersection's efficiency by up to $200\%$ while also conforming to the specified tunable risk threshold.

Nadya Abdel Madjid, Murad Mebrahtu, Zakhar Yagudin et al.

Predicting future trajectories of surrounding traffic agents is critical for safe autonomous navigation and collision avoidance. Despite all advances in the trajectory forecasting realm, the prediction models remains vulnerable to uncertainty caused by occlusions, limited sensing range, and perception errors. Collaborative vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) approaches help reduce this uncertainty by sharing complementary information. Existing collaborative trajectory prediction methods typically fuse feature maps at the perception stage to construct a holistic scene view. Further this holistic representation is decoded into the future trajectories. Such design incurs substantial communication overhead due to the exchange of high-dimensional feature representations and often assumes idealized bandwidth and synchronization, limiting practical deployment. We address these limitations by shifting collaboration from perception to the prediction module and introducing a late-fusion framework for shared forecasts. The framework is model-agnostic and treats collaborating vehicles as independent asynchronous agents. We evaluate the approach on the OPV2V, V2V4Real, and DeepAccident datasets, comparing individual and collaborative forecasting. Across all datasets, late fusion consistently reduces miss rate and improves trajectory success rate ($\mathrm{TSR}_{0.5}$), defined as the fraction of ground-truth agents with final displacement error below 0.5 m. On the real-world V2V4Real dataset, collaborative prediction improves the success rate by $1.69\%$ and $1.22\%$ for both intelligent vehicles, respectively, compared with individual forecasting.

Zakhar Yagudin, Murad Mebrahtu, Ren Jin et al.

High-speed autonomous racing presents extreme perception challenges, including large relative velocities and substantial domain shifts from conventional urban-driving datasets. Existing benchmarks do not adequately capture these high-dynamic conditions. We introduce EagleVision, a unified LiDAR-based multi-task benchmark for 3D detection and trajectory prediction in high-speed racing, providing newly annotated 3D bounding boxes for the Indy Autonomous Challenge dataset (14,893 frames) and the A2RL Real competition dataset (1,163 frames), together with 12,000 simulator-generated annotated frames, all standardized under a common evaluation protocol. Using a dataset-centric transfer framework, we quantify cross-domain generalization across urban, simulator, and real racing domains. Urban pretraining improves detection over scratch training (NDS 0.72 vs. 0.69), while intermediate pretraining on real racing data achieves the best transfer to A2RL (NDS 0.726), outperforming simulator-only adaptation. For trajectory prediction, Indy-trained models surpass in-domain A2RL training on A2RL test sequences (FDE 0.947 vs. 1.250), highlighting the role of motion-distribution coverage in cross-domain forecasting. EagleVision enables systematic study of perception generalization under extreme high-speed dynamics. The dataset and benchmark are publicly available at https://avlab.io/EagleVision

Rashid Alyassi, Majid Khonji

Autonomous vehicles face the problem of optimizing the expected performance of subsequent maneuvers while bounding the risk of collision with surrounding dynamic obstacles. These obstacles, such as agent vehicles, often exhibit stochastic transitions that should be accounted for in a timely and safe manner. The Constrained Stochastic Shortest Path problem (C-SSP) is a formalism for planning in stochastic environments under certain types of operating constraints. While C-SSP allows specifying constraints in the planning problem, it does not allow for bounding the probability of constraint violation, which is desired in safety-critical applications. This work's first contribution is an exact integer linear programming formulation for Chance-constrained SSP (CC-SSP) that attains deterministic policies. Second, a randomized rounding procedure is presented for stochastic policies. Third, we show that the CC-SSP formalism can be generalized to account for constraints that span through multiple time steps. Evaluation results show the usefulness of our approach in benchmark problems compared to existing approaches.

Christopher J. Holder, Majid Khonji, Jorge Dias et al.

A major challenge in machine learning is resilience to out-of-distribution data, that is data that exists outside of the distribution of a model's training data. Training is often performed using limited, carefully curated datasets and so when a model is deployed there is often a significant distribution shift as edge cases and anomalies not included in the training data are encountered. To address this, we propose the Input Optimisation Network, an image preprocessing model that learns to optimise input data for a specific target vision model. In this work we investigate several out-of-distribution scenarios in the context of semantic segmentation for autonomous vehicles, comparing an Input Optimisation based solution to existing approaches of finetuning the target model with augmented training data and an adversarially trained preprocessing model. We demonstrate that our approach can enable performance on such data comparable to that of a finetuned model, and subsequently that a combined approach, whereby an input optimization network is optimised to target a finetuned model, delivers superior performance to either method in isolation. Finally, we propose a joint optimisation approach, in which input optimization network and target model are trained simultaneously, which we demonstrate achieves significant further performance gains, particularly in challenging edge-case scenarios. We also demonstrate that our architecture can be reduced to a relatively compact size without a significant performance impact, potentially facilitating real time embedded applications.

Nadya Abdel Madjid, Murad Mebrahtu, Abdulrahman Ahmad et al.

This paper introduces the Emirates Multi-Task (EMT) dataset, designed to support multi-task benchmarking within a unified framework. It comprises over 30,000 frames from a dash-camera perspective and 570,000 annotated bounding boxes, covering approximately 150 kilometers of driving routes that reflect the distinctive road topology, congestion patterns, and driving behavior of Gulf region traffic. The dataset supports three primary tasks: tracking, trajectory forecasting, and intention prediction. Each benchmark is accompanied by corresponding evaluations: (1) multi-agent tracking experiments addressing multi-class scenarios and occlusion handling; (2) trajectory forecasting evaluation using deep sequential and interaction-aware models; and (3) intention prediction experiments based on observed trajectories. The dataset is publicly available at https://avlab.io/emt-dataset, with pre-processing scripts and evaluation models at https://github.com/AV-Lab/emt-dataset.

Majid Khonji

The fixed-horizon constrained Markov Decision Process (C-MDP) is a well-known model for planning in stochastic environments under operating constraints. Chance-Constrained MDP (CC-MDP) is a variant that allows bounding the probability of constraint violation, which is desired in many safety-critical applications. CC-MDP can also model a class of MDPs, called Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP), under dead-ends, where there is a trade-off between the probability-to-goal and cost-to-goal. This work studies the structure of (C)C-MDP, particularly an important variant that involves local transition. In this variant, the state reachability exhibits a certain degree of locality and independence from the remaining states. More precisely, the number of states, at a given time, that share some reachable future states is always constant. (C)C-MDP under local transition is NP-Hard even for a planning horizon of two. In this work, we propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for (C)C-MDP that computes (near) optimal deterministic policies. Such an algorithm is among the best approximation algorithm attainable in theory and gives insights into the approximability of constrained MDP and its variants.

Nadya Abdel Madjid, Abdulrahman Ahmad, Murad Mebrahtu et al.

As the potential for autonomous vehicles to be integrated on a large scale into modern traffic systems continues to grow, ensuring safe navigation in dynamic environments is crucial for smooth integration. To guarantee safety and prevent collisions, autonomous vehicles must be capable of accurately predicting the trajectories of surrounding traffic agents. Over the past decade, significant efforts from both academia and industry have been dedicated to designing solutions for precise trajectory forecasting. These efforts have produced a diverse range of approaches, raising questions about the differences between these methods and whether trajectory prediction challenges have been fully addressed. This paper reviews a substantial portion of recent trajectory prediction methods proposing a taxonomy to classify existing solutions. A general overview of the prediction pipeline is also provided, covering input and output modalities, modeling features, and prediction paradigms existing in the literature. In addition, the paper discusses active research areas within trajectory prediction, addresses the posed research questions, and highlights the remaining research gaps and challenges.

Mohamed Nagy, Naoufel Werghi, Bilal Hassan et al.

This paper addresses limitations in 3D tracking-by-detection methods, particularly in identifying legitimate trajectories and reducing state estimation drift in Kalman filters. Existing methods often use threshold-based filtering for detection scores, which can fail for distant and occluded objects, leading to false positives. To tackle this, we propose a novel track validity mechanism and multi-stage observational gating process, significantly reducing ghost tracks and enhancing tracking performance. Our method achieves a $29.47\%$ improvement in Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) on the KITTI validation dataset with the Second detector. Additionally, a refined Kalman filter term reduces localization noise, improving higher-order tracking accuracy (HOTA) by $4.8\%$. The online framework, RobMOT, outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple detectors, with HOTA improvements of up to $3.92\%$ on the KITTI testing dataset and $8.7\%$ on the validation dataset, while achieving low identity switch scores. RobMOT excels in challenging scenarios, tracking distant objects and prolonged occlusions, with a $1.77\%$ MOTA improvement on the Waymo Open dataset, and operates at a remarkable 3221 FPS on a single CPU, proving its efficiency for real-time multi-object tracking.

Abdelmoamen Nasser, Yousef Baba'a, Murad Mebrahtu et al.

Traditional approaches to off-road autonomy rely on separate models for terrain classification, height estimation, and quantifying slip or slope conditions. Utilizing several models requires training each component separately, having task specific datasets, and fine-tuning. In this work, we present a zero-shot approach leveraging SAM2 for environment segmentation and a vision-language model (VLM) to reason about drivable areas. Our approach involves passing to the VLM both the original image and the segmented image annotated with numeric labels for each mask. The VLM is then prompted to identify which regions, represented by these numeric labels, are drivable. Combined with planning and control modules, this unified framework eliminates the need for explicit terrain-specific models and relies instead on the inherent reasoning capabilities of the VLM. Our approach surpasses state-of-the-art trainable models on high resolution segmentation datasets and enables full stack navigation in our Isaac Sim offroad environment.

Sumbal Malik, Majid Khonji, Khaled Elbassioni et al.

The rapid growth of e-commerce and the increasing demand for timely, cost-effective last-mile delivery have increased interest in collaborative logistics. This research introduces a novel collaborative synchronized multi-platform vehicle routing problem with drones and robots (VRP-DR), where a fleet of $\mathcal{M}$ trucks, $\mathcal{N}$ drones and $\mathcal{K}$ robots, cooperatively delivers parcels. Trucks serve as mobile platforms, enabling the launching, retrieving, and en-route charging of drones and robots, thereby addressing critical limitations such as restricted payload capacities, limited range, and battery constraints. The VRP-DR incorporates five realistic features: (1) multi-visit service per trip, (2) multi-trip operations, (3) flexible docking, allowing returns to the same or different trucks (4) cyclic and acyclic operations, enabling return to the same or different nodes; and (5) en-route charging, enabling drones and robots to recharge while being transported on the truck, maximizing operational efficiency by utilizing idle transit time. The VRP-DR is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) to minimize both operational costs and makespan. To overcome the computational challenges of solving large-scale instances, a scalable heuristic algorithm, FINDER (Flexible INtegrated Delivery with Energy Recharge), is developed, to provide efficient, near-optimal solutions. Numerical experiments across various instance sizes evaluate the performance of the MILP and heuristic approaches in terms of solution quality and computation time. The results demonstrate significant time savings of the combined delivery mode over the truck-only mode and substantial cost reductions from enabling multi-visits. The study also provides insights into the effects of en-route charging, docking flexibility, drone count, speed, and payload capacity on system performance.

Mohamed Nagy, Naoufel Werghi, Bilal Hassan et al.

This work addresses the critical lack of precision in state estimation in the Kalman filter for 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) and the ongoing challenge of selecting the appropriate motion model. Existing literature commonly relies on constant motion models for estimating the states of objects, neglecting the complex motion dynamics unique to each object. Consequently, trajectory division and imprecise object localization arise, especially under occlusion conditions. The core of these challenges lies in the limitations of the current Kalman filter formulation, which fails to account for the variability of motion dynamics as objects navigate their environments. This work introduces a novel formulation of the Kalman filter that incorporates motion dynamics, allowing the motion model to adaptively adjust according to changes in the object's movement. The proposed Kalman filter substantially improves state estimation, localization, and trajectory prediction compared to the traditional Kalman filter. This is reflected in tracking performance that surpasses recent benchmarks on the KITTI and Waymo Open Datasets, with margins of 0.56\% and 0.81\% in higher order tracking accuracy (HOTA) and multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA), respectively. Furthermore, the proposed Kalman filter consistently outperforms the baseline across various detectors. Additionally, it shows an enhanced capability in managing long occlusions compared to the baseline Kalman filter, achieving margins of 1.22\% in higher order tracking accuracy (HOTA) and 1.55\% in multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA) on the KITTI dataset. The formulation's efficiency is evident, with an additional processing time of only approximately 0.078 ms per frame, ensuring its applicability in real-time applications.

Eyad Shaklab, Areg Karapetyan, Arjun Sharma et al.

In addition to its crucial impact on customer satisfaction, last-mile delivery (LMD) is notorious for being the most time-consuming and costly stage of the shipping process. Pressing environmental concerns combined with the recent surge of e-commerce sales have sparked renewed interest in automation and electrification of last-mile logistics. To address the hurdles faced by existing robotic couriers, this paper introduces a customer-centric and safety-conscious LMD system for small urban communities based on AI-assisted autonomous delivery robots. The presented framework enables end-to-end automation and optimization of the logistic process while catering for real-world imposed operational uncertainties, clients' preferred time schedules, and safety of pedestrians. To this end, the integrated optimization component is modeled as a robust variant of the Cumulative Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, where routes are constructed under uncertain travel times with an objective to minimize the total latency of deliveries (i.e., the overall waiting time of customers, which can negatively affect their satisfaction). We demonstrate the proposed LMD system's utility through real-world trials in a university campus with a single robotic courier. Implementation aspects as well as the findings and practical insights gained from the deployment are discussed in detail. Lastly, we round up the contributions with numerical simulations to investigate the scalability of the developed mathematical formulation with respect to the number of robotic vehicles and customers.

Bushra Alshehhi, Areg Karapetyan, Khaled Elbassioni et al.

With the electrification of transportation, the rising uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) might stress distribution networks significantly, leaving their performance degraded and stability jeopardized. To accommodate these new loads cost-effectively, modern power grids require coordinated or ``smart'' charging strategies capable of optimizing EV charging scheduling in a scalable and efficient fashion. With this in view, the present work focuses on reservation management programs for large-scale, networked EV charging stations. We formulate a time-coupled binary optimization problem that maximizes EV users' total welfare gain while accounting for the network's available power capacity and stations' occupancy limits. To tackle the problem at scale while retaining high solution quality, a data-driven optimization framework combining techniques from the fields of Deep Learning and Approximation Algorithms is introduced. The framework's key ingredient is a novel input-output processing scheme for neural networks that allows direct extrapolation to problem sizes substantially larger than those included in the training set. Extensive numerical simulations based on synthetic and real-world data traces verify the effectiveness and superiority of the presented approach over two representative scheduling algorithms. Lastly, we round up the contributions by listing several immediate extensions to the proposed framework and outlining the prospects for further exploration.

Majid Khonji, Jorge Dias, Lakmal Seneviratne

A significant barrier to deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) on a massive scale is safety assurance. Several technical challenges arise due to the uncertain environment in which AVs operate such as road and weather conditions, errors in perception and sensory data, and also model inaccuracy. In this paper, we propose a system architecture for risk-aware AVs capable of reasoning about uncertainty and deliberately bounding the risk of collision below a given threshold. We discuss key challenges in the area, highlight recent research developments, and propose future research directions in three subsystems. First, a perception subsystem that detects objects within a scene while quantifying the uncertainty that arises from different sensing and communication modalities. Second, an intention recognition subsystem that predicts the driving-style and the intention of agent vehicles (and pedestrians). Third, a planning subsystem that takes into account the uncertainty, from perception and intention recognition subsystems, and propagates all the way to control policies that explicitly bound the risk of collision. We believe that such a white-box approach is crucial for future adoption of AVs on a large scale.

Muhammad Aftab, Sid Chi-Kin Chau, Majid Khonji

Conventional HVAC control systems are usually incognizant of the physical structures and materials of buildings. These systems merely follow pre-set HVAC control logic based on abstract building thermal response models, which are rough approximations to true physical models, ignoring dynamic spatial variations in built environments. To enable more accurate and responsive HVAC control, this paper introduces the notion of "self-aware" smart buildings, such that buildings are able to explicitly construct physical models of themselves (e.g., incorporating building structures and materials, and thermal flow dynamics). The question is how to enable self-aware buildings that automatically acquire dynamic knowledge of themselves. This paper presents a novel approach using "augmented reality". The extensive user-environment interactions in augmented reality not only can provide intuitive user interfaces for building systems, but also can capture the physical structures and possibly materials of buildings accurately to enable real-time building simulation and control. This paper presents a building system prototype incorporating augmented reality, and discusses its applications.

Rashid Alyassi, Majid Khonji, Areg Karapetyan et al.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are being increasingly deployed throughout the globe as a means to streamline monitoring, inspection, mapping, and logistic routines. When dispatched on autonomous missions, drones require an intelligent decision-making system for trajectory planning and tour optimization. Given the limited capacity of their onboard batteries, a key design challenge is to ensure the underlying algorithms can efficiently optimize the mission objectives along with recharging operations during long-haul flights. With this in view, the present work undertakes a comprehensive study on automated tour management systems for an energy-constrained drone: (1) We construct a machine learning model that estimates the energy expenditure of typical multi-rotor drones while accounting for real-world aspects and extrinsic meteorological factors. (2) Leveraging this model, the joint program of flight mission planning and recharging optimization is formulated as a multi-criteria Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (ATSP), wherein a drone seeks for the time-optimal energy-feasible tour that visits all the target sites and refuels whenever necessary. (3) We devise an efficient approximation algorithm with provable worst-case performance guarantees and implement it in a drone management system, which supports real-time flight path tracking and re-computation in dynamic environments. (4) The effectiveness and practicality of the proposed approach are validated through extensive numerical simulations as well as real-world experiments.