Smart Infrastructure: A Research Junction
Manuel Hetzel Hannes Reichert Konrad Doll Bernhard Sick
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.