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AI Agent Driven Sensing, Data Acquisition, and Signal Processing Methods in Autonomous Driving

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Vehicular Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2026 | Viewed by 694

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
Interests: advanced driver assistance systems; human-vehicle interaction; human-in-the-loop; driving envelope; collision avoidance; safety assessment

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In autonomous driving, system-level autonomy is increasingly being shaped not only by perception and control algorithms but also by agentic decision-making that can plan, decompose tasks, invoke tools/models, and supervise execution under changing conditions. In this Special Issue, “AI agent” refers to an autonomous software entity (or a coordinated set of entities) that pursues driving goals with a certain degree of autonomy by combining reasoning, planning, memory, tool use, and outcome validation, rather than a narrow “agent” in the reinforcement learning sense. This concept has been widely described as goal-driven systems that can independently decide actions and execute multi-step workflows via available tools and feedback loops. Against this backdrop, AI agent-driven autonomous driving technologies emphasize closed-loop and system-level intelligence: agents can orchestrate heterogeneous modules (e.g., perception, prediction, mapping, risk assessment, motion planning, and control), call external tools or specialized models for grounding and verification, and coordinate multiple agents (vehicle–vehicle, vehicle–infrastructure, or multi-modal agents) to handle negotiation, intention sharing, and complex interactive scenarios. Recent studies on LLM/VLM-based driving–agent frameworks further highlight the opportunity to connect high-level reasoning with 3D driving tasks and active perception, improving interpretability and robustness when deployed in realistic environments. This Special Issue aims to publish state-of-the-art research and review articles that advance the theory, architecture, algorithms, and experimental validation of AI agent-driven autonomous driving, with particular interest in approaches that deliver measurable gains in safety, real-time performance, reliability, and deployability on embedded vehicle platforms. We welcome contributions that bridge agent intelligence with optimization-based motion planning/control, safety assurance, and engineering systems integration for real-world driving.

We seek high-quality original research and review articles focusing on innovative solutions applicable to real-world autonomous driving scenarios. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • AI agents for autonomous driving.
  • Agent-driven decision making and system-level autonomy.
  • Task decomposition and tool-augmented driving intelligence.
  • LLM/VLM-enabled autonomous driving agents.
  • Multi-agent coordination and interaction in traffic scenarios.
  • Agent-supervised optimization-based motion planning and control.
  • Risk-aware and safety-critical agentic decision making.
  • Real-time agent-based planning, control, and execution monitoring.
  • Embedded and compute-aware deployment of driving agents.
  • Verification, validation, and safety assurance for AI agent–driven driving systems.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Bai Li
Dr. Xiaohui Li
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • AI agents
  • agent-driven autonomy
  • autonomous driving systems
  • multi-agent coordination
  • agent-based decision making
  • agent-supervised control
  • risk-aware driving
  • real-time autonomy
  • safety assurance

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

29 pages, 10248 KB  
Article
Fs2PA: A Full-Scale Feature Synergistic Perception Architecture for Vehicular Infrared Object Detection via Physical Priors and Semantic Constraints
by Boxuan Pei, Leyuan Wu, Xiaoyan Zheng, Chao Zhou and Dingxiang Wang
Sensors 2026, 26(7), 2257; https://doi.org/10.3390/s26072257 - 6 Apr 2026
Viewed by 373
Abstract
Vehicular infrared object detection is a key technology supporting autonomous driving systems to achieve all-weather environmental perception. However, infrared images inherently lack texture, resulting in blurred object contours. Additionally, deep network propagation severely erodes and loses feature information of distant tiny objects. To [...] Read more.
Vehicular infrared object detection is a key technology supporting autonomous driving systems to achieve all-weather environmental perception. However, infrared images inherently lack texture, resulting in blurred object contours. Additionally, deep network propagation severely erodes and loses feature information of distant tiny objects. To address the above issues, this study proposes a Full-Scale Feature Synergistic Perception Architecture for vehicular infrared object detection. This architecture first designs a Gradient-Informed Attention module, which initializes convolution kernels through physical gradient operators to inject geometric prior information into the network, enhancing the model’s perception capability of blurred object boundaries. Secondly, it constructs a Full-Scale Feature Pyramid containing a P2 high-resolution feature layer to effectively recover the geometric detail features of distant tiny objects. Finally, it proposes a Scale-Aware Shared Head, which relies on a cross-scale parameter sharing mechanism to achieve extreme parameter compression, and simultaneously introduces deep semantic information to form strong constraints, suppressing noise interference in shallow features. Experimental results on the FLIR v2 and M3FD datasets show that the proposed architecture exhibits excellent detection performance. On FLIR v2, it raises mAP@50 to 64.06% (6.51% relative gain vs. YOLOv11) while maintaining 547 FPS inference speed, achieving an optimal accuracy–efficiency balance. Full article
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