Chao Sun

Chao Sun, Xinwei Shen, Scott Moura

This paper proposes a robust optimal eco-driving control strategy considering multiple signalized intersections with uncertain traffic signal timing. A spatial vehicle velocity profile optimization formulation is developed to minimize the global fuel consumption, with driving time as one state variable. We introduce the concept of effective red-light duration (ERD), formulated as a random variable, to describe the feasible passing time through signalized intersections. A chance constraint is appended to the optimal control problem to incorporate robustness with respect to uncertain signal timing. The optimal eco-driving control problem is solved via dynamic programming (DP). Simulation results demonstrate that the optimal eco-driving can save fuel consumption by 50-57% while maintaining arrival time at the same level, compared with a modified intelligent driver model as the benchmark. The robust formulation significantly reduces traffic intersection violations, in the face of uncertain signal timing, with small sacrifice on fuel economy compared to a non-robust approach.

Hongwen He, Hui Jia, Fengchun Sun et al.

A stochastic model predictive controller (SMPC) of air conditioning (AC) system is proposed to improve the energy efficiency of electric vehicles (EV). A Markov-chain based velocity predictor is adopted to provide a sense of the future disturbances over the SMPC control horizon. The sensitivity of electrified AC plant to solar radiation, ambient temperature and relative air flow speed is quantificationally analyzed from an energy efficiency perspective. Three control approaches are compared in terms of the electricity consumption, cabin temperature, and comfort fluctuation, which are (i) the proposed SMPC method, (ii) a generally used bang-bang controller and (iii) dynamic programming (DP) as the benchmark. Real solar radiation and ambient temperature data are measured to validate the effectiveness of the SMPC. Comparison results illustrate that SMPC is able to improve the AC energy economy by 12% than rule-based controller. The cabin temperature variation is reduced by over 50.4%, resulting with a much better cabin comfort.

Yueran Zhao, Zhang Zhang, Chao Sun et al.

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) collaborative perception extends sensing beyond single vehicle limits through transmission. However, as more agents participate, existing frameworks face two key challenges: (1) the participating agents are inherently multi-modal and heterogeneous, and (2) the collaborative framework must be scalable to accommodate new agents. The former requires effective cross-agent feature alignment to mitigate heterogeneity loss, while the latter renders full-parameter training impractical, highlighting the importance of scalable adaptation. To address these issues, we propose Heterogeneous Adaptation (HeatV2X), a scalable collaborative framework. We first train a high-performance agent based on heterogeneous graph attention as the foundation for collaborative learning. Then, we design Local Heterogeneous Fine-Tuning and Global Collaborative Fine-Tuning to achieve effective alignment and interaction among heterogeneous agents. The former efficiently extracts modality-specific differences using Hetero-Aware Adapters, while the latter employs the Multi-Cognitive Adapter to enhance cross-agent collaboration and fully exploit the fusion potential. These designs enable substantial performance improvement of the collaborative framework with minimal training cost. We evaluate our approach on the OPV2V-H and DAIR-V2X datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior perception performance with significantly reduced training overhead, outperforming existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our implementation will be released soon.

Zhang Zhang, Chao Sun, Chao Yue et al.

Roadside vision centric 3D object detection has received increasing attention in recent years. It expands the perception range of autonomous vehicles, enhances the road safety. Previous methods focused on predicting per-pixel height rather than depth, making significant gains in roadside visual perception. While it is limited by the perspective property of near-large and far-small on image features, making it difficult for network to understand real dimension of objects in the 3D world. BEV features and voxel features present the real distribution of objects in 3D world compared to the image features. However, BEV features tend to lose details due to the lack of explicit height information, and voxel features are computationally expensive. Inspired by this insight, an efficient framework learning height prediction in voxel features via transformer is proposed, dubbed HeightFormer. It groups the voxel features into local height sequences, and utilize attention mechanism to obtain height distribution prediction. Subsequently, the local height sequences are reassembled to generate accurate 3D features. The proposed method is applied to two large-scale roadside benchmarks, DAIR-V2X-I and Rope3D. Extensive experiments are performed and the HeightFormer outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in roadside vision centric 3D object detection task.

Tianze Wang, Zhang Zhang, Chao Sun

The classification of the type of road surface (RSC) aims to utilize pavement features to identify the roughness, wet and dry conditions, and material information of the road surface. Due to its ability to effectively enhance road safety and traffic management, it has received widespread attention in recent years. In autonomous driving, accurate RSC allows vehicles to better understand the road environment, adjust driving strategies, and ensure a safer and more efficient driving experience. For a long time, vision-based RSC has been favored. However, existing visual classification methods have overlooked the exploration of fine-grained classification of pavement types (such as similar pavement textures). In this work, we propose a pure vision-based fine-grained RSC method for autonomous driving scenarios, which fuses local and global feature information through the stacking of convolutional and transformer modules. We further explore the stacking strategies of local and global feature extraction modules to find the optimal feature extraction strategy. In addition, since fine-grained tasks also face the challenge of relatively large intra-class differences and relatively small inter-class differences, we propose a Foreground-Background Module (FBM) that effectively extracts fine-grained context features of the pavement, enhancing the classification ability for complex pavements. Experiments conducted on a large-scale pavement dataset containing one million samples and a simplified dataset reorganized from this dataset achieved Top-1 classification accuracies of 92.52% and 96.50%, respectively, improving by 5.69% to 12.84% compared to SOTA methods. These results demonstrate that RoadFormer outperforms existing methods in RSC tasks, providing significant progress in improving the reliability of pavement perception in autonomous driving systems.

Zhang Zhang, Chao Sun, Chao Yue et al.

Serving the Intelligent Transport System (ITS) and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) tasks, roadside perception has received increasing attention in recent years, as it can extend the perception range of connected vehicles and improve traffic safety. However, roadside point cloud oriented 3D object detection has not been effectively explored. To some extent, the key to the performance of a point cloud detector lies in the receptive field of the network and the ability to effectively utilize the scene context. The recent emergence of Mamba, based on State Space Model (SSM), has shaken up the traditional convolution and transformers that have long been the foundational building blocks, due to its efficient global receptive field. In this work, we introduce Mamba to pillar-based roadside point cloud perception and propose a framework based on Cross-stage State-space Group (CSG), called PillarMamba. It enhances the expressiveness of the network and achieves efficient computation through cross-stage feature fusion. However, due to the limitations of scan directions, state space model faces local connection disrupted and historical relationship forgotten. To address this, we propose the Hybrid State-space Block (HSB) to obtain the local-global context of roadside point cloud. Specifically, it enhances neighborhood connections through local convolution and preserves historical memory through residual attention. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the popular large scale roadside benchmark: DAIR-V2X-I. The code will be released soon.

Tianze Wang, Zhang Zhang, Chao Yue et al.

Acquiring the road surface conditions in advance based on visual technologies provides effective information for the planning and control system of autonomous vehicles, thus improving the safety and driving comfort of the vehicles. Recently, the Mamba architecture based on state-space models has shown remarkable performance in visual processing tasks, benefiting from the efficient global receptive field. However, existing Mamba architectures struggle to achieve state-of-the-art visual road surface classification due to their lack of effective extraction of the local texture of the road surface. In this paper, we explore for the first time the potential of visual Mamba architectures for road surface classification task and propose a method that effectively combines local and global perception, called RoadMamba. Specifically, we utilize the Dual State Space Model (DualSSM) to effectively extract the global semantics and local texture of the road surface and decode and fuse the dual features through the Dual Attention Fusion (DAF). In addition, we propose a dual auxiliary loss to explicitly constrain dual branches, preventing the network from relying only on global semantic information from the deep large receptive field and ignoring the local texture. The proposed RoadMamba achieves the state-of-the-art performance in experiments on a large-scale road surface classification dataset containing 1 million samples.