Online Verification Enabling Approval of Driving Functions—Implementation for a Planner of an Autonomous Race Vehicle

• Main Authors: Tim Stahl, Frank Diermeyer
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems
• Subjects: Autonomous vehicles; formal verification; runtime environment; software safety; vehicle safety
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9424710/

Safety guarantees and regulatory approval for autonomous vehicles remain an ongoing challenge. In particular, software that is frequently adapted or contains complex, non-transparent components, such as artificial intelligence, is exceeding the limits of safety standards. This paper presents a detailed implementation of an online verification module – the Supervisor – that copes with these challenges. The presented implementation focuses on autonomous race vehicles without loss of generality. Following an identified holistic list of safety-relevant requirements for a trajectory, metrics are developed to monitor whether the trajectory can safely be executed. To evaluate safety with respect to dynamic objects in a semi-structured and highly dynamic racing environment, rule-based reachable sets are presented. As a result, the pure reachable set is further constrained by applicable regulations. Real-time capability and effectiveness are demonstrated in fault-injected scenario-based tests and on real-world run data. The implemented Supervisor will be publicly available on GitHub.