The Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) market is expected to double by 2030, rapidly transforming maritime logistics through faster deliveries, lower costs, reduced risks from human error, and the potential to save human lives. ASVs depend on robust object detection models to ensure safe navigation. However, existing models are often susceptible to natural corruptions such as blur, noise, adverse weather, and occlusions-risks to perception robustness further intensified by the lack of domain-specific robustness benchmarks. To fill this gap, we propose the first waterborne-focused robustness benchmark, incorporating 25 synthetic corruptions (15 adapted from ImageNet-C plus 10 novel ones for ASVs) across five severity levels. We also incorporate mixed corruptions to capture real-world complexity. Building on three public waterborne datasets (SeaShips, SMD, SSAVE), we create SeaShips-C, SMD-C, and SSAVE-C, each augmented with our corruption suite. A comprehensive robustness evaluation is conducted on multiple sizes of YOLOv8, SSD, NanoDet-Plus, and RT-DETR, revealing critical vulnerabilities: e.g., YOLOv8n's mAP⁵⁰ drops by 43.0 % under contrast corruption on SeaShips-C, reaching a 59.5 % decline when combined with raindrops. Larger variants (e.g., YOLOv8x) exhibit greater robustness, offering insights for safer deployments. Aligned with ISO/IEC TR 5469 and IEC 61508, our benchmark supports pre-deployment verification. By identifying risk-prone conditions, practitioners can apply targeted mitigation strategies, such as data augmentation and human oversight. To promote further research and support industrial practice, we provide open access to all benchmark datasets and code-which can also serve as a data augmentation resource to enhance model training.

We present a vehicle system capable of navigating safely and efficiently around Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs), such as pedestrians and cyclists. The system comprises key modules for environment perception, localization and mapping, motion planning, and control, integrated into a prototype vehicle. A key innovation is a motion planner based on Topology-driven Model Predictive Control (T-MPC). The guidance layer generates multiple trajectories in parallel, each representing a distinct strategy for obstacle avoidance or non-passing. The underlying trajectory optimization constrains the joint probability of collision with VRUs under generic uncertainties. To address extraordinary situations ('edge cases') that go beyond the autonomous capabilities - such as construction zones or encounters with emergency responders - the system includes an option for remote human operation, supported by visual and haptic guidance. In simulation, our motion planner outperforms three baseline approaches in terms of safety and efficiency. We also demonstrate the full system in prototype vehicle tests on a closed track, both in autonomous and remotely operated modes.

Mobility is vital for societal wellbeing, economic growth, social inclusion, and access to essential amenities. However, the current system faces significant challenges, including environmental impact, unequal access, and safety concerns. […]

Panoptic Scene Graph Generation (PSG) aims to segment objects and recognize their relations, enabling the structured understanding of an image. Previous methods focus on predicting predefined object and relation categories, hence limiting their applications in the open world scenarios. With the rapid development of large multimodal models (LMMs), significant progress has been made in open-set object detection and segmentation, yet open-set relation prediction in PSG remains unexplored. In this paper, we focus on the task of open-set relation prediction integrated with a pretrained open-set panoptic segmentation model to achieve true open-set panoptic scene graph generation (OpenPSG). Our OpenPSG leverages LMMs to achieve open-set relation prediction in an autoregressive manner. We introduce a relation query transformer to efficiently extract visual features of object pairs and estimate the existence of relations between them. The latter can enhance the prediction efficiency by filtering irrelevant pairs. Finally, we design the generation and judgement instructions to perform open-set relation prediction in PSG autoregressively. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose the open-set PSG task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-set relation prediction and panoptic scene graph generation.

We present a versatile NeRF-based simulator for testing autonomous driving (AD) software systems, designed with a focus on sensor-realistic closed-loop evaluation and the creation of safety-critical scenarios. The simulator learns from sequences of real-world driving sensor data and enables reconfigurations and renderings of new, unseen scenarios. In this work, we use our simulator to test the responses of AD models to safety-critical scenarios inspired by the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP). Our evaluation reveals that, while state-of-the-art end-to-end planners excel in nominal driving scenarios in an open-loop setting, they exhibit critical flaws when navigating our safety-critical scenarios in a closed-loop setting. This highlights the need for advancements in the safety and real-world usability of end-to-end planners. By publicly releasing our simulator and scenarios as an easy-to-run evaluation suite, we invite the research community to explore, refine, and validate their AD models in controlled, yet highly configurable and challenging sensor-realistic environments.

Multi-sensor object detection is an active research topic in automated driving, but the robustness of such detection models against missing sensor input (modality missing), e.g., due to a sudden sensor failure, is a critical problem which remains under-studied. In this work, we propose UniBEV, an end-to-end multi-modal 3D object detection framework designed for robustness against missing modalities: UniBEV can operate on LiDAR plus camera input, but also on LiDAR-only or camera-only input without retraining. To facilitate its detector head to handle different input combinations, UniBEV aims to create well-aligned Bird’s Eye View (BEV) feature maps from each available modality. Unlike prior BEV-based multi-modal detection methods, all sensor modalities follow a uniform approach to resample features from the original sensor coordinate systems to the BEV features. We furthermore investigate the robustness of various fusion strategies w.r.t. missing modalities: the commonly used feature concatenation, but also channel-wise averaging, and a generalization to weighted averaging termed Channel Normalized Weights. To validate its effectiveness, we compare UniBEV to state-of-the-art BEVFusion and MetaBEV on nuScenes over all sensor input combinations. In this setting, UniBEV achieves better performance than these baselines for all input combinations. An ablation study shows the robustness benefits of fusing by weighted averaging over regular concatenation, and of sharing queries between the BEV encoders of each modality. Our code is available at https://github.com/tudelft-iv/UniBEV.

This work addresses cross-view camera pose estimation, i.e., determining the 3-Degrees-of-Freedom camera pose of a given ground-level image w.r.t. an aerial image of the local area. We propose SliceMatch, which consists of ground and aerial feature extractors, feature aggregators, and a pose predictor. The feature extractors extract dense features from the ground and aerial images. Given a set of candidate camera poses, the feature aggregators construct a single ground descriptor and a set of pose-dependent aerial descriptors. Notably, our novel aerial feature aggregator has a cross-view attention module for ground-view guided aerial feature selection and utilizes the geometric projection of the ground camera's viewing frustum on the aerial image to pool features. The efficient construction of aerial descriptors is achieved using precomputed masks. SliceMatch is trained using contrastive learning and pose estimation is formulated as a similarity comparison between the ground descriptor and the aerial descriptors. Compared to the state-of-the-art, SliceMatch achieves a 19% lower median localization error on the VIGOR benchmark using the same VGG16 backbone at 150 frames per second, and a 50% lower error when using a ResNet50 backbone.

Motion prediction and planning are key components to enable autonomous driving. Although high definition (HD) maps provide important contextual information that constrains the action space of traffic participants, most approaches are not able to fully exploit this heterogeneous information. In this work, we enrich the existing road geometry of the popular nuScenes dataset and convert it into the open-source map framework Lanelet2. This allows easy access to the road topology and thus, enables the usage of (1) spatial semantic information, such as agents driving on intersecting roads and (2) map-generated anchor paths for target vehicles that can help to improve trajectory prediction performance. Further, we present DMAP, a simple, yet effective approach for diverse map-based anchor path generation and filtering. We show that combining DMAP with ground truth velocity profile information yields high-quality motion prediction results on nuScenes (MinADE5=1.09, MissRate5,2=0.18, Offroad rate=0.00). While it is obviously unfair to compare us against the state-of-the-art, it shows that our HD map accurately depicts the road geometry and topology. Future approaches can leverage this by focusing on data-driven sampling of map-based anchor paths and estimating velocity profiles. Moreover, our HD map can be used for map construction tasks and supplement perception. Code and data are made publicly available at https://felixhertlein.github.io/lanelet4nuscenes.