Innovative methods for road infrastructure digitization

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Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) hold the promise to bring about a paradigm shift in transportation safety and mobility. Despite recent advances in the automotive industry/research, a fully autonomous system in complex general road environments has not been fully realized, partially due to the bottlenecks caused by AV technologies. The enormous amount of computations and power required for AVs to operate safely in real-time and at high levels of autonomy is beyond the capabilities of any battery-powered vehicle control system. As such, offloading expensive computation workloads to the infrastructure is an active and trending area of research. Recent efforts and collaborative initiatives between the automotive industry, infrastructure owners, and academia shifted towards supporting CAVs with High Definition Maps and semantic road datasets. This project's ultimate goal is to develop methods to build performance-based semantic layers of high definition Maps. Semantic layers of HD maps contain processed information (e.g., traffic signs, obstacles locations, travel lanes, road edges, speed limits, road curvature, gradient, etc.) that can be directly used by CAVs local computer systems. The outcome of this research will facilitate the testing of several vehicle sensor designs in virtual reality on a digitized replica of existing roads collected using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scanners. The potential outcomes and benefits to Alberta and Canada of this (and similar) projects cannot be overstated: 1) offer a solution to resolve some of the most significant bottlenecks due to existing CAV technologies (e.g., sensor limitations, dynamic occlusions, etc.); 2) improve workload management of local CAV systems; 3) assist government agencies in testing automakers sensor configurations on existing infrastructure in a virtual environment; 4) help stakeholders make informed decisions regarding smart infrastructure investments; 5) allow Canadians to realize the full potential from CAVs over the next decade; and 6) maintain Alberta and Canada's economic and technological competitiveness.