Configuration and Design Schemes of Environmental Sensing and Vehicle Computing Systems for Automated Driving: A Review

The recent proliferation of sensing and computing technologies has promoted the rapid development of automated driving. A series of automated driving systems are consecutively released by manufactures in recent years. These systems at different automated driving levels rely on various perception sensors and vehicle computing system to detect the environment and process the real-time data. The configuration of environmental sensing and vehicle computing in the system design stage for facilitating automated driving are attracting more and more attention. In this article, we investigate the state-of-the-art configuration design schemes of a perception system and a computing system in automated driving at different levels of automation, involving up to 30 automated driving systems or vehicles. A comprehensive analysis by statistics approaches is followed with the emphasis of underlying design patterns and the cross relationships among environmental sensing, vehicle computing, and automated driving levels. Furthermore, from a general perspective, we analyze and conclude the requirement on the perception system and the computing system in automated vehicles, considering typical features in each automated driving level. We expect that this work could serve as a reference for practical engineering on the configuration design for automated driving systems, and promote academic research on relative theories and methodologies for system design.