Validation and testing of the decentralized architecture for the occupancy grid filtering pipeline

Abstract

A reliable and precise model of the environment is of the highest importance for autonomous vehicles. Occupancy grids are a well-known approach for environment modeling and are a crucial part of multiple autonomous driving functionalities. The standard method is to use a single 2D occupancy grid to model the environment using nonground points. In this paper, we propose a decentralized occupancy grid filtering chain (pipeline) where a high-density 64-layer LiDAR provided the input to our pipeline. Our approach enables us to obtain detailed 2D and 3D models of the environment simultaneously. The pipeline was validated on different scenarios in both simulation and real world. The performance of the designed occupancy grid pipeline was evaluated by the proposed key performance indicators (KPIs) based on accuracy. The results have shown that the approach was able to extract free space information with a high degree of accuracy, while reducing the size of the unobserved area in the grid compared to the standard methods and achieving real-time performance.