Perception Task Offloading With Collaborative Computation for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving has so far received numerous attention from academia and industry. However, the inevitable occlusion is a great menace to safety and reliable driving. Existing works have primarily focused on improving the perception ability of a single autonomous vehicle (AV), but the safety problem brought by occlusions remains unanswered. In this paper, we propose a multi-tier perception task offloading framework with a collaborative computing approach, where an AV is able to achieve a comprehensive perception of the concerned region-of-interest (RoI) by leveraging collaborative computation with nearby AVs and road side units (RSUs). Besides, the collaborative computation provides offloading service for computationally intensive tasks so as to reduce processing delay. Specifically, we formulate a joint problem of perception task assignment, offloading and resource allocation, by fully considering the AV’s mobility, task dependency, and delay requirement. The collaborative offloading is modeled as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. We design a two-layer binary intelligent firefly (TL-BIFA) algorithm to solve MINLP, with the goal of minimizing execution delay. The proposed TL-BIFA synthesizes the advantages of heuristic methods and deterministic methods. Through extensive simulations, the proposed collaborative offloading approach and the TL-BIFA show superiority in enhancing the autonomous driving system’s safety, efficiency and resource utilization.