Safe At Any Speed: A Simulation-Based Test Harness for Autonomous Vehicles

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Penn collection
Real-Time and Embedded Systems Lab (mLAB)
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
CPS Auto
CPS Model-Based Design
CPS Real-Time
autonomous vehicles
safety
perception
testing
simulation
Computer Engineering
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Abbas, Houssam
O'Kelly, Matthew
Mangharam, Rahul
Contributor
Abstract

The testing of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) requires driving the AV billions of miles under varied scenarios in order to find bugs, accidents and otherwise inappropriate behavior. Because driving a real AV that many miles is too slow and costly, this motivates the use of sophisticated `world simulators', which present the AV's perception pipeline with realistic input scenes, and present the AV's control stack with realistic traffic and physics to which to react. Thus the simulator is a crucial piece of any CAD toolchain for AV testing. In this work, we build a test harness for driving an arbitrary AV's code in a simulated world. We demonstrate this harness by using the game Grand Theft Auto V (GTA) as world simulator for AV testing. Namely, our AV code, for both perception and control, interacts in real-time with the game engine to drive our AV in the GTA world, and we search for weather conditions and AV operating conditions that lead to dangerous situations. This goes beyond the current state-of-the-art where AVs are tested under ideal weather conditions, and lays the ground work for a more comprehensive testing effort. We also propose and demonstrate necessary analyzes to validate the simulation results relative to the real world. The results of such analyses allow the designers and verification engineers to weigh the results of simulation-based testing.

Advisor
Date of presentation
2017-10-19
Conference name
Real-Time and Embedded Systems Lab (mLAB)
Conference dates
2023-05-17T20:22:41.000
Conference location
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Comments
Recommended citation
@inproceedings{AOKRM17, TITLE = {Safe At Any Speed: A Simulation-Based Test Harness for Autonomous Vehicles}, AUTHOR = {Houssam Abbas and Matthew O'Kelly and Alena Rodionova and Rahul Mangharam}, EDITOR = {}, BOOKTITLE = {7th Workshop on Design, Modeling and Evaluation of Cyber Physical Systems (CyPhy17)}, MONTH = {October}, YEAR = {2017} }
Collection