MULTI-STAGE SENSOR FUSION ARCHITECTURE FOR AUTOMATED DRIVING SYSTEMS

A method for generating predictive output for an ADS of a vehicle is disclosed. The method includes, by a first hardware platform, encoding a first sensor dataset from a first cluster of sensors using first encoder networks and fusing the encoded data using a first sensor fusion network to form first fused sensor data features. The method further includes, by a second hardware platform, encoding a second sensor dataset from a second cluster of sensors using second encoder networks and fusing the encoded data using a second sensor fusion network to form second fused sensor data features. The first and second hardware platforms are separate, and each sensor in the first cluster differs from those in the second cluster. Thereafter, the first and second fused feature sets are fused using a third sensor fusion network to form third fused features, and generate a predictive output using decoder networks.