Mission-Level Runtime Assurance Framework for Autonomous Driving

This paper studies runtime safety for autonomous driving when high-level driving commands become faulty or unreliable. Unlike conventional runtime-safety approaches that mainly focus on immediate vehicle safety, the proposed framework evaluates both driving safety and whether the vehicle can still successfully complete its mission before a command is executed. The framework extends highway-env with mission-level fault scenarios such as skipping required checkpoints, entering restricted areas, and generating future routes that can no longer complete the mission successfully. A runtime monitoring system is introduced to detect and reject unsafe or mission-infeasible commands before execution. For comparison, an adapted Simplex-Drive runtime-safety baseline with learning-based driving control, safety fallback control, and runtime controller switching is implemented using the public Simplex-Drive framework. Experimental results show that platform-level runtime safety alone cannot detect mission-level planning faults, while the proposed framework successfully rejects mission-infeasible commands and improves mission success under randomized fault conditions.

RACF: A Resilient Autonomous Car Framework with Object Distance Correction

Autonomous vehicles are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, where sensing failures or cyberphysical attacks can lead to unsafe operations resulting in human loss and/or severe physical damages. Reliable real-time perception is therefore critically important for their safe operations and acceptability. For example, vision-based distance estimation is vulnerable to environmental degradation and adversarial perturbations, and existing defenses are often reactive and too slow to promptly mitigate their impacts on safe operations. We present a Resilient Autonomous Car Framework (RACF) that incorporates an Object Distance Correction Algorithm (ODCA) to improve perception-layer robustness through redundancy and diversity across a depth camera, LiDAR, and physics-based kinematics. Within this framework, when obstacle distance estimation produced by depth camera is inconsistent, a cross-sensor gate activates the correction algorithm to fix the detected inconsistency. We have experiment with the proposed resilient car framework and evaluate its performance on a testbed implemented using the Quanser QCar 2 platform. The presented framework achieved up to 35% RMSE reduction under strong corruption and improves stop compliance and braking latency, while operating in real time. These results demonstrate a practical and lightweight approach to resilient perception for safety-critical autonomous driving

Security and Resilience in Autonomous Vehicles: A Proactive Design Approach

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) promise efficient, clean and cost-effective transportation systems, but their reliance on sensors, wireless communications, and decision-making systems makes them vulnerable to cyberattacks and physical threats. This chapter presents novel design techniques to strengthen the security and resilience of AVs. We first provide a taxonomy of potential attacks across different architectural layers, from perception and control manipulation to Vehicle-to-Any (V2X) communication exploits and software supply chain compromises. Building on this analysis, we present an AV Resilient architecture that integrates redundancy, diversity, and adaptive reconfiguration strategies, supported by anomaly- and hash-based intrusion detection techniques. Experimental validation on the Quanser QCar platform demonstrates the effectiveness of these methods in detecting depth camera blinding attacks and software tampering of perception modules. The results highlight how fast anomaly detection combined with fallback and backup mechanisms ensures operational continuity, even under adversarial conditions. By linking layered threat modeling with practical defense implementations, this work advances AV resilience strategies for safer and more trustworthy autonomous vehicles.