Recent advances in machine learning technologies and sensing have paved the way for the belief that safe, accessible, and convenient autonomous vehicles may be realized in the near future. Despite tremendous advances within this context, fundamental challenges around safety and reliability are limiting their arrival and comprehensive adoption. Autonomous vehicles are often tasked with operating in dynamic and uncertain environments. As a result, they often make use of highly complex components, such as machine learning approaches, to handle the nuances of sensing, actuation, and control. While these methods are highly effective, they are notoriously difficult to assure. Moreover, within uncertain and dynamic environments, design time assurance analyses may not be sufficient to guarantee safety. Thus, it is critical to monitor the correctness of these systems at runtime. One approach for providing runtime assurance of systems with components that may not be amenable to formal analysis is the simplex architecture, where an unverified component is wrapped with a safety controller and a switching logic designed to prevent dangerous behavior. In this paper, we propose using a real-time reachability algorithm for the implementation of the simplex architecture to assure the safety of a 1/10 scale open source autonomous vehicle platform known as F1/10. The reachability algorithm that we leverage (a) provides provable guarantees of safety, and (b) is used to detect potentially unsafe scenarios. In our approach, the need to analyze an underlying controller is abstracted away, instead focusing on the effects of the controller's decisions on the system's future states. We demonstrate the efficacy of our architecture through a vast set of experiments conducted both in simulation and on an embedded hardware platform.
翻译:机械学习技术和感知的最近进步为这样一种信念铺平了道路:安全、无障碍和方便的自主车辆可以在不远的将来实现安全、无障碍和方便的自主车辆。尽管在这方面取得了巨大的进步,但安全性和可靠性方面的根本性挑战正在限制这些系统的到来和全面采用。自主车辆的任务往往是在动态和不确定的环境中运作。因此,它们往往使用非常复杂的部件,如机器学习方法,处理感知、动作和控制的细微差别,这些方法非常有效,但众所周知难以保证。此外,在不确定和动态的环境中,设计时间保证分析可能不足以保证安全。因此,监测这些系统的运行是否正确至关重要。一个提供运行时保证的系统中可能不易于正式分析的部件的方法就是简单化的结构,在这个结构中,一个未经核实的部件被包装成安全控制器,一个旨在防止危险行为的逻辑。我们建议采用实时的可实现算法来实施简单x结构,以确保已知为F1/10的开放型自动车源平台的安全性。一个潜在的自动平台的可实现性,一个我们用来定位的系统在F1/10中,一个潜在地分析的逻辑分析系统,一个我们用来利用的可实现的系统。一个杠杆,一个杠杆,一个对安全的系统进行定位的可操作的可实现的系统进行定位。