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1. Classification of Roadway Infrastructure and Collaborative Automated Driving System

   https://doi.org/10.4271/12-06-04-0026  

   Ran, Bin; Cheng, Yang; Li, Shen; Li, Hanchu; Parker, Steven (December 2023, SAE International Journal of Connected and Automated Vehicles)

   The latest developments in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-anything (V2X) technologies enable all the entities in the transportation system to communicate and collaborate to optimize transportation safety, mobility, and equity at the system level. On the other hand, the community of researchers and developers is becoming aware of the critical role of roadway infrastructure in realizing automated driving. In particular, intelligent infrastructure systems, which leverage modern sensors, artificial intelligence, and communication capabilities, can provide critical information and control support to connected and/or automated vehicles to fulfill functions that are infeasible for automated vehicles alone due to technical or cost considerations. However, there is limited research on formulating and standardizing the intelligence levels of road infrastructure to facilitate the development, as the SAE automated driving levels have done for automated vehicles. This article proposes a five-level intelligence definition for intelligent roadway infrastructure, namely, connected and automated highway (CAH). The CAH is a subsystem of the more extensive collaborative automated driving system (CADS), along with the connected automated vehicle (CAV) subsystem. Leveraging the intelligence definition of CAH, the intelligence definition for the CADS is also defined. Examples of how the CAH at different levels operates with the CAV in the CADS are also introduced to demonstrate the dynamic allocation of various automated driving tasks between different entities in the CADS. 

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2. Pillar Attention Encoder for Adaptive Cooperative Perception

   https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2024.3390552  

   Bai, Zhengwei; Wu, Guoyuan; Barth, Matthew J; Qiu, Hang; Liu, Yongkang; Sisbot, Emrah Akin; Oguchi, Kentaro (January 2024, IEEE Internet of Things Journal)

   Interest in cooperative perception is growing quickly due to its remarkable performance in improving perception capabilities for connected and automated vehicles. This improvement is crucial, especially for automated driving scenarios in which perception performance is one of the main bottlenecks to the development of safety and efficiency. However, current cooperative perception methods typically assume that all collaborating vehicles have enough communication bandwidth to share all features with an identical spatial size, which is impractical for real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Cooperative Perception, a new cooperative perception framework that is not limited by the aforementioned assumptions, aiming to enable cooperative perception under more realistic and challenging conditions. To support this, a novel feature encoder is proposed and named Pillar Attention Encoder. A pillar attention mechanism is designed to extract the feature data while considering its significance for the perception task. An adaptive feature filter is proposed to adjust the size of the feature data for sharing by considering the importance value of the feature. Experiments are conducted for cooperative object detection from multiple vehicle-based and infrastructure-based LiDAR sensors under various communication conditions. Results demonstrate that our method can successfully handle dynamic communication conditions and improve the mean Average Precision by 10.18% when compared with the state-of-the-art feature encoder. 

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3. CAVeliEr: Automated Security Evaluation for Connected Autonomous Vehicle Applications

   S. Boddupalli; V. S. G. Chamarthi; C. Lin; S. Ray (October 2022, 25th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation (ITSC 2022))

   Connected Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) applications have shown the promise of transformative impact on road safety, transportation experience, and sustainability. However, they open large and complex attack surfaces: an adversary can corrupt sensory and communication inputs with catastrophic results. A key challenge in development of security solutions for CAV applications is the lack of effective infrastructure for evaluating such solutions. In this paper, we address the problem by designing an automated, flexible evaluation infrastructure for CAV security solutions. Our tool, CAVELIER, provides an extensible evaluation architecture for CAV security solutions against compromised communication and sensor channels. The tool can be customized for a variety of CAV applications and to target diverse usage models. We illustrate the framework with a number of case studies for security resiliency evaluation in Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC). 

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4. Comparison of Infrastructure- and Onboard Vehicle-Based Sensor Systems in Measuring Operational Safety Assessment (OSA) Metrics

   https://doi.org/10.4271/2023-01-0858  

   Das, Siddharth; Rath, Prabin; Lu, Duo; Smith, Tyler; Wishart, Jeffrey; Yu, Hongbin (April 2023, SAE Technical Paper)

   The operational safety of Automated Driving System (ADS)-Operated Vehicles (AVs) are a rising concern with the deployment of AVs as prototypes being tested and also in commercial deployment. The robustness of safety evaluation systems is essential in determining the operational safety of AVs as they interact with human-driven vehicles. Extending upon earlier works of the Institute of Automated Mobility (IAM) that have explored the Operational Safety Assessment (OSA) metrics and infrastructure-based safety monitoring systems, in this work, we compare the performance of an infrastructure-based Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) system to an onboard vehicle-based LIDAR system in testing at the Maricopa County Department of Transportation SMARTDrive testbed in Anthem, Arizona. The sensor modalities are located in infrastructure and onboard the test vehicles, including LIDAR, cameras, a real-time differential GPS, and a drone with a camera. Bespoke localization and tracking algorithms are created for the LIDAR and cameras. In total, there are 26 different scenarios of the test vehicles navigating the testbed intersection; for this work, we are only considering car following scenarios. The LIDAR data collected from the infrastructure-based and onboard vehicle-based sensors system are used to perform object detection and multi-target tracking to estimate the velocity and position information of the test vehicles and use these values to compute OSA metrics. The comparison of the performance of the two systems involves the localization and tracking errors in calculating the position and the velocity of the subject vehicle, with the real-time differential GPS data serving as ground truth for velocity comparison and tracking results from the drone for OSA metrics comparison. 

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5. CADET: A Modular Platform for Evaluating Distributed Cooperative Autonomy in Connected Autonomous Vehicles

   Sharma, Pragya; Wang, Brian; Srivastava, Mani (June 2026, 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA))

   Deep learning models are increasingly central to autonomous vehicle (AV) pipelines, yet their integration has traditionally followed a monolithic design where perception, planning, and control execute on a single onboard computer. This design overlooks the emerging paradigm of cooperative autonomy, where vehicles interact with roadside units (RSUs), edge servers, and cloud-hosted intelligence through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity. Cooperative perception and control improve safety and efficiency, but also introduce systems-level challenges: network latency, compute heterogeneity, and multi-tenant contention, all critically affect real-time decision-making. These challenges are further amplified by the increasing reliance on large foundation models, whose scale necessitates cloud deployment.We present CADET (Cooperative Autonomy through Distributed Experimentation Toolkit), a modular platform for systematic and reproducible evaluation of distributed cooperative autonomy systems under realistic deployment conditions. CADET decouples the AV stack into composable modules that can be flexibly deployed across vehicles, infrastructure, and edge/cloud tiers. The framework integrates state-of-the-art models, incorporates trace-driven network and workload emulation, and provides synchronized model-, system-, and task-level instrumentation. Through V2V and V2I experiments, we show that distributed deployment choices fundamentally shape safety, with V2V intent packets outperforming cloud-based perception and RSU-assisted perception sustaining safety until overloaded by concurrent requests. Although designed for AV pipelines, CADET also supports dataset-driven experimentation, enabling systems and ML researchers to benchmark distributed inference workloads independently of full vehicle simulation. CADET is open source, with code and demo available at https://nesl.github.io/cadet-web. 

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