EMP: edge-assisted multi-vehicle perception

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) heavily rely on 3D sensors such as LiDARs, radars, and stereo cameras. However, 3D sensors from a single vehicle suffer from two fundamental limitations: vulnerability to occlusion and loss of details on far-away objects. To overcome both limitations, in this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate EMP, a novel edge-assisted multi-vehicle perception system for CAVs. In EMP, multiple nearby CAVs share their raw sensor data with an edge server which then merges CAVs' individual views to form a more complete view with a higher resolution. The merged view can drastically enhance the perception quality of the participating CAVs. Our core methodological contribution is to make the sensor data sharing scalable, adaptive, and resource-efficient over oftentimes highly fluctuating wireless links through a series of novel algorithms, which are then integrated into a full-fledged cooperative sensing pipeline. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that EMP can achieve real-time processing at 24 FPS and end-to-end latency of 93 ms on average. EMP reduces the end-to-end latency by 49% to 65% compared to the traditional vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) sharing approach without edge support. Our case studies show that cooperative sensing powered by EMP can detect hazards such as blind spots faster by 0.5 to 1.1 seconds, compared to a single vehicle's perception.