AutowareV2X: Reliable V2X Communication and Collective Perception for Autonomous Driving

For cooperative intelligent transport systems (CITS), vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is utilized to allow autonomous vehicles to share critical information with each other. We propose AutowareV2X, an implementation of a V2X communication module that is integrated into the autonomous driving (AD) software, Autoware. AutowareV2X provides external connectivity to the entire AD stack, enabling the end-to-end (E2E) experimentation and evaluation of connected autonomous vehicles (CAV). The Collective Perception Service was also implemented, allowing the transmission of Collective Perception Messages (CPMs). A dual-channel mechanism that enables wireless link redundancy on the critical object information shared by CPMs is also proposed. Performance evaluation in field experiments has indicated that the CPM-based perception information can be transmitted in around 30 ms, and shared object data can be used by the AD software to conduct collision avoidance maneuvers. The dual-channel delivery of CPMs transmits perception information through two different wireless technologies. The receiver-side CAV can then dynamically select the best CPM from CPMs received from both links, depending on the freshness of their information.