Recent years have seen tremendous iterations on autonomous driving technologies, pushing the deployment of self-driving cars closer to its realization. As the experimental deployments scale, more challenging and less frequent corner cases surface to stress-test the reliability of the autonomous driving system. Examples of these corner cases include limited visibility due to occlusion, degraded perception at long range, transient reflection and so on. To address the limited visibility issue, in particular, cooperative perception has been proposed to leverage vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication to share perception data with nearby vehicles to fill in the invisible area. In this talk, I will present a line of cooperative perception system research from its initial prototyping, and scaling up, to its expansion from perception to end-to-end driving behaviors.
Dr. Hang Qiu is an Assistant Professor at ECE and a cooperating faculty at CSE at the University of California, Riverside. Prof. Qiu leads the Collaborative Intelligence Systems Lab (CISL) which innovates in cooperative robots and networked autonomous systems. Qiu is also a faculty member of the RAISE@UCR Institute, the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CRIS), and a faculty member of Center for Environmental Research and Technology (CE-CERT). Before joining UCR, Prof. Qiu was a software engineer at Waymo, Google’s (Alphabet’s) self-driving car spin-off, a postdoctoral scholar in the Platform Lab at Stanford University, worked in Microsoft Research, IBM Research, and collaborated with General Motors for over five years. Qiu received the Ph.D. degree from the Networked Systems Lab at University of Southern California, and the bachelor degree from the IIoT at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.