Safe Perception -- A Hierarchical Monitor Approach

Our transportation world is rapidly transforming induced by an ever increasing level of autonomy. However, to obtain license of fully automated vehicles for widespread public use, it is necessary to assure safety of the entire system, which is still a challenge. This holds in particular for AI-based perception systems that have to handle a diversity of environmental conditions and road users, and at the same time should robustly detect all safety relevant objects (i.e no detection misses should occur). Yet, limited training and validation data make a proof of fault-free operation hardly achievable, as the perception system might be exposed to new, yet unknown objects or conditions on public roads. Hence, new safety approaches for AI-based perception systems are required. For this reason we propose in this paper a novel hierarchical monitoring approach that is able to validate the object list from a primary perception system, can reliably detect detection misses, and at the same time has a very low false alarm rate.

Fault-Tolerant Perception for Automated Driving A Lightweight Monitoring Approach

While the most visible part of the safety verification process of automated vehicles concerns the planning and control system, it is often overlooked that safety of the latter crucially depends on the fault-tolerance of the preceding environment perception. Modern perception systems feature complex and often machine-learning-based components with various failure modes that can jeopardize the overall safety. At the same time, a verification by for example redundant execution is not always feasible due to resource constraints. In this paper, we address the need for feasible and efficient perception monitors and propose a lightweight approach that helps to protect the integrity of the perception system while keeping the additional compute overhead minimal. In contrast to existing solutions, the monitor is realized by a well-balanced combination of sensor checks -- here using LiDAR information -- and plausibility checks on the object motion history. It is designed to detect relevant errors in the distance and velocity of objects in the environment of the automated vehicle. In conjunction with an appropriate planning system, such a monitor can help to make safe automated driving feasible.

Robustness of Object Detectors in Degrading Weather Conditions

State-of-the-art object detection systems for autonomous driving achieve promising results in clear weather conditions. However, such autonomous safety critical systems also need to work in degrading weather conditions, such as rain, fog and snow. Unfortunately, most approaches evaluate only on the KITTI dataset, which consists only of clear weather scenes. In this paper we address this issue and perform one of the most detailed evaluation on single and dual modality architectures on data captured in real weather conditions. We analyse the performance degradation of these architectures in degrading weather conditions. We demonstrate that an object detection architecture performing good in clear weather might not be able to handle degrading weather conditions. We also perform ablation studies on the dual modality architectures and show their limitations.

Precise localization relative to 3D Automated Driving map using the Decentralized Kalman filter with Feedback

This paper represents the novel high precision localization approach for Automated Driving (AD) relative to 3D map. The AD maps are not necessarily flat. Hence, the problem of localization is solved here in 3D. The vehicle motion is modeled as piecewise planner but with vertical curvature which is approximated with clothoids. The localization problem is solved with Decentralized Kalman filter with feedback (DKFF) by fusing all available information. The odometry, visual odometry, GPS, the different sensor and mono camera inputs are fused together to obtain the precise localization relative to map. Polylines and landmarks from the map are dealt in the same way because of the line - point geometrical duality. A set of weak filters are accumulated in the strong tracking approach leading to the precise localization results.