Smart Infrastructure: A Research Junction
This work addresses safety and efficiency challenges for urban traffic management and automated driving development, but it is incremental as it builds on existing smart infrastructure concepts.
The researchers tackled the problem of complex inner-city junctions causing accidents by developing a smart infrastructure with a multiple-view camera system and digital twin to enhance scene understanding for highly automated driving systems, enabling research on data generation, sensor evaluation, and AI training strategies.
Complex inner-city junctions are among the most critical traffic areas for injury and fatal accidents. The development of highly automated driving (HAD) systems struggles with the complex and hectic everyday life within those areas. Sensor-equipped smart infrastructures, which can communicate and cooperate with vehicles, are essential to enable a holistic scene understanding to resolve occlusions drivers and vehicle perception systems for themselves can not cover. We introduce an intelligent research infrastructure equipped with visual sensor technology, located at a public inner-city junction in Aschaffenburg, Germany. A multiple-view camera system monitors the traffic situation to perceive road users' behavior. Both motorized and non-motorized traffic is considered. The system is used for research in data generation, evaluating new HAD sensors systems, algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) training strategies using real-, synthetic- and augmented data. In addition, the junction features a highly accurate digital twin. Real-world data can be taken into the digital twin for simulation purposes and synthetic data generation.