Seamless Virtual Reality With Integrated Synchronizer and Synthesizer for Autonomous Driving

Virtual reality (VR) is a promising data engine for autonomous driving (AD). However, data fidelity in this paradigm is often degraded by VR inconsistency, for which the existing VR approaches become ineffective, as they ignore the inter-dependency between low-level VR synchronizer designs (i.e., data collector) and high-level VR synthesizer designs (i.e., data processor). This paper presents a seamless virtual reality ( <tex-math notation="LaTeX">SVR</tex-math> ) platform for AD, which mitigates such inconsistency, enabling VR agents to interact with each other in a shared symbiotic world. The crux to <tex-math notation="LaTeX">SVR</tex-math> is an integrated synchronizer and synthesizer ( <tex-math notation="LaTeX">IS²</tex-math> ) design, which consists of a drift-aware lidar-inertial synchronizer for VR colocation and a motion-aware deep visual synthesis network for augmented reality image generation. We implement <tex-math notation="LaTeX">SVR</tex-math> on car-like robots in two sandbox platforms, achieving a cm-level VR colocalization accuracy and 3.2% VR image deviation, thereby avoiding missed collisions or model clippings. Experiments show that the proposed <tex-math notation="LaTeX">SVR</tex-math> reduces the intervention times, missed turns, and failure rates compared to other benchmarks. The <tex-math notation="LaTeX">SVR</tex-math> -trained neural network can handle unseen situations in real-world environments, by leveraging its knowledge learnt from the VR space.