Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs) are becoming more advanced and ubiquitous, enabled by increasingly sophisticated deep neural networks (DNNs). As ADSs’ autonomy levels rise, so does the cost and complexity of their failures. Often, these failures arise when these DNNs are less robust than expected. In studying these systems, I found… Read more
Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) rely on massive amounts of sensed data to train their underlying deep neural networks (DNNs). Common sensor hardware migrations can render an existing DNN-dependent pipeline inadequate. This necessitates the development of bespoke transformations to adapt new sensor data to the old trained network, or the retraining… Read more
Adequately covering the behaviors of autonomous vehicles ($AV$) is fundamental in their validation. However, quantifying such coverage is challenging as the $AV$s’ behavior is influenced by its physical environment that is often large and highly complex. This work builds on the insights that data sensed by the $AV$ provides a… Read more
Adversarial test generation techniques aim to produce input perturbations that cause a DNN to compute incorrect outputs. For autonomous vehicles driven by a DNN, however, the effect of such perturbations are attenuated by other parts of the system and are less effective as vehicle state evolves. In this work we… Read more
Openpilot is an open source system to assist drivers by providing features like automated lane centering and adaptive cruise control. Like most systems for autonomous vehicles, Openpilot relies on a sophisticated deep neural network (DNN) to provide its functionality, one that is susceptible to safety property violations that can lead… Read more
Most undergraduates are not equipped to manage the unique challenges in developing software for modern robots, despite rapid expansion of the field. We here introduce a course we have designed and delivered to better prepare students to develop software for robot systems. It emphasizes the distinctive challenges of software development… Read more
Complex environments can cause robots to fail. Identifying the key elements of the environment associated with such failures is critical for faster fault isolation and, ultimately, debugging those failures. In this work we present the first automated approach for reducing the environment in which a robot failed. Similar to software… Read more
Probabilistic invariants can encode a family of conditional patterns, are generated using Bayesian inference to leverage observed trace data against priors gleaned from previous experience and expert knowledge, and are ranked based on their surprise value and information content. Our studies on two semi-autonomous mobile robotic systems show how the… Read more
Robotics utilizes algorithms for control, localization, and navigation that rely heavily on complex data structures such as matrices and graphs. The values of these data structures are the result of interleaved controllers and complex interactions between equations that are difficult to parameterize as they relate to observed behavior. This makes… Read more
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