For a wheelchair user, a standard blue line on a map is often a broken promise. While platforms like OpenStreetMap (OSM) successfully capture where a path is, they frequently fail to convey how it physically feels to travel on it.
arXiv:2607. 16156v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Urban intersections are among the most hazardous locations in road networks, posing significant risks to vehicles and vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians and cyclists.
By Tam Bang, Hussam Abubakr, Emiliano de la Garza Villarreal, Truc Phuong Nguyen, Austin Harris, Toru Hirano, Mina Sartipi, Yunfei Xu, Hoang H. Nguyen
arXiv:2511. 14592v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show great promise for autonomous driving, but their suitability for safety-critical scenarios is largely unexplored, raising safety concerns.
By Xianhui Meng, Yuchen Zhang, Zhijian Huang, Zheng Lu, Ziling Ji, Yandan Lin, Yaoyao Yin, Hongyuan Zhang, Wei Zhou, Guangfeng Jiang, Li Zhang, Long Chen, Hangjun Ye, Jun Liu, Xiaoshuai Hao
iOSPointMapper is a mobile app that performs real‑time, privacy‑conscious sidewalk mapping using on‑device semantic segmentation, LiDAR depth estimation, and fused GPS/IMU data on recent iPhones and iPads. It detects and localizes sidewalk‑relevant features such as traffic signs, traffic lights, and poles, and includes a user‑guided annotation interface for validating outputs before submission. The anonymized data is transmitted to the Transportation Data Exchange Initiative (TDEI), where it integrates with broader multimodal transportation datasets, and evaluations show the app’s potential for enhanced pedestrian mapping.
By Himanshu Naidu, Yuxiang Zhang, Sachin Mehta, Anat Caspi
The study evaluates whether vision‑language models (VLMs) can reliably assess sidewalk accessibility attributes—effective width, longitudinal slope, cross slope, and pavement condition—from pedestrian‑level images. Using sampling‑based conformal prediction on 514 images from Seoul, the authors find that calibrated models achieve nominal 90% coverage, but only effective width yields informative estimates; other attributes remain too uncertain for compliance assessment. The work also demonstrates that raw sampling dispersion is not a trustworthy uncertainty measure without calibration and releases annotated images with ground‑truth measurements.
By Seung Jae Lieu, Diego Morra, Chiara Cadoni, Wonseop Song, Martina Mazzarello, Carlo Ratti
arXiv:2606. 01277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current end-to-end autonomous driving systems predominantly rely on frame-based sensors, which suffer from inherent perception latency and motion blur during highly dynamic encounters, specifically sudden pedestrian crossings.
By Oskar Natan, Andi Dharmawan, Aufaclav Zatu Kusuma Frisky, Jazi Eko Istiyanto, Jun Miura