Robust Collaborative Perception without External Localization and Clock Devices

A consistent spatial-temporal coordination across multiple agents is fundamental for collaborative perception, which seeks to improve perception abilities through information exchange among agents. To achieve this spatial-temporal alignment, traditional methods depend on external devices to provide localization and clock signals. However, hardware-generated signals could be vulnerable to noise and potentially malicious attack, jeopardizing the precision of spatial-temporal alignment. Rather than relying on external hardwares, this work proposes a novel approach: aligning by recognizing the inherent geometric patterns within the perceptual data of various agents. Following this spirit, we propose a robust collaborative perception system that operates independently of external localization and clock devices. The key module of our system, FreeAlign, constructs a salient object graph for each agent based on its detected boxes and uses a graph neural network to identify common subgraphs between agents, leading to accurate relative pose and time. We validate FreeAlign on both real-world and simulated datasets. The results show that, the FreeAlign empowered robust collaborative perception system perform comparably to systems relying on precise localization and clock devices. Code will be released.