Ensuring the safety of autonomous robots, such as self-driving vehicles, requires extensive testing across diverse driving scenarios. Simulation is a key ingredient for conducting such testing in a cost-effective and scalable way. Neural rendering methods have gained popularity, as they can build simulation environments from collected logs in a data-driven manner. However, existing neural radiance field (NeRF) methods for sensor-realistic rendering of camera and lidar data suffer from low rendering speeds, limiting their applicability for large-scale testing. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time rendering, current methods are limited to camera data and are unable to render lidar data essential for autonomous driving. To address these limitations, we propose SplatAD, the first 3DGS-based method for realistic, real-time rendering of dynamic scenes for both camera and lidar data. SplatAD accurately models key sensor-specific phenomena such as rolling shutter effects, lidar intensity, and lidar ray dropouts, using purposebuilt algorithms to optimize rendering efficiency. Evaluation across three autonomous driving datasets demonstrates that SplatAD achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality with up to +2 PSNR for NVS and +3 PSNR for reconstruction while increasing rendering speed over NeRF-based methods by an order of magnitude. See here for our project page.

Environment perception is a key enabling technology in autonomous vehicles, and multiple object tracking is an important part of this. High resolution sensors, such as automotive radar and lidar, leads to the so called extended target tracking problem, in which there are multiple detections per tracked object. For computationally feasible multiple extended target tracking, the data association problem must be handled. Previous work has relied on the use of clustering algorithms, together with assignment algorithms, to achieve this. In this paper we present a stochastic optimisation method that directly maximises the desired likelihood function, and solves the problem in a single step, rather than two steps (clustering+assignment). The proposed method is evaluated against previous work in an experiment where Velodyne data is used to track pedestrians, and the results clearly show that the proposed method achieves the best performance, especially in challenging scenarios.

This paper presents an algorithm for estimating the shape of the road ahead of a host vehicle equipped with the following onboard sensors: a camera, a radar, and vehicle internal sensors. The aim is to accurately describe the road geometry up to 200 m ahead in highway scenarios. This purpose is accomplished by deriving a precise clothoid-based road model for which we design a Bayesian fusion framework. Using this framework, the road geometry is estimated using sensor observations on the shape of the lane markings, the heading of leading vehicles, and the position of roadside radar reflectors. The evaluation on sensor data shows that the proposed algorithm is capable of capturing the shape of the road well, even in challenging mountainous highways.

This paper describes an algorithm for estimating the road ahead of a host vehicle based on the measurements from several onboard sensors: a camera, a radar, wheel speed sensors, and an inertial measurement unit. We propose a novel road model that is able to describe the road ahead with higher accuracy than the usual polynomial model. We also develop a Bayesian fusion system that uses the following information from the surroundings: lane marking measurements obtained by the camera and leading vehicle and stationary object measurements obtained by a radar-camera fusion system. The performance of our fusion algorithm is evaluated in several drive tests. As expected, the more information we use, the better the performance is.