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

RAGE-XY: RADAR-Aided Longitudinal and Lateral Forces Estimation For Autonomous Race Cars

In this work, we present RAGE-XY, an extended version of RAGE, a real-time estimation framework that simultaneously infers vehicle velocity, tire slip angles, and the forces acting on the vehicle using only standard onboard sensors such as IMUs and RADARs. Compared to the original formulation, the proposed method incorporates an online RADAR calibration module, improving the accuracy of lateral velocity estimation in the presence of sensor misalignment. Furthermore, we extend the underlying vehicle model from a single-track approximation to a tricycle model, enabling the estimation of rear longitudinal tire forces in addition to lateral dynamics. We validate the proposed approach through both high-fidelity simulations and real-world experiments conducted on the EAV-24 autonomous race car, demonstrating improved accuracy and robustness in estimating both lateral and longitudinal vehicle dynamics.

RAGE: A Tightly Coupled Radar-Aided Grip Estimator For Autonomous Race Cars

Real-time estimation of vehicle-tire-road friction is critical for allowing autonomous race cars to safely and effectively operate at their physical limits. Traditional approaches to measure tire grip often depend on costly, specialized sensors that require custom installation, limiting scalability and deployment. In this work, we introduce RAGE, a novel real-time estimator that simultaneously infers the vehicle velocity, slip angles of the tires and the lateral forces that act on them, using only standard sensors, such as IMUs and RADARs, which are commonly available on most of modern autonomous platforms. We validate our approach through both high-fidelity simulations and real-world experiments conducted on the EAV-24 autonomous race car, demonstrating the accuracy and effectiveness of our method in estimating the vehicle lateral dynamics.

Dynamic Lookahead Distance via Reinforcement Learning-Based Pure Pursuit for Autonomous Racing

Pure Pursuit (PP) is a widely used path-tracking algorithm in autonomous vehicles due to its simplicity and real-time performance. However, its effectiveness is sensitive to the choice of lookahead distance: shorter values improve cornering but can cause instability on straights, while longer values improve smoothness but reduce accuracy in curves. We propose a hybrid control framework that integrates Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with the classical Pure Pursuit controller to adjust the lookahead distance dynamically during racing. The PPO agent maps vehicle speed and multi-horizon curvature features to an online lookahead command. It is trained using Stable-Baselines3 in the F1TENTH Gym simulator with a KL penalty and learning-rate decay for stability, then deployed in a ROS2 environment to guide the controller. Experiments in simulation compare the proposed method against both fixed-lookahead Pure Pursuit and an adaptive Pure Pursuit baseline. Additional real-car experiments compare the learned controller against a fixed-lookahead Pure Pursuit controller. Results show that the learned policy improves lap-time performance and repeated lap completion on unseen tracks, while also transferring zero-shot to hardware. The learned controller adapts the lookahead by increasing it on straights and reducing it in curves, demonstrating effectiveness in augmenting a classical controller by online adaptation of a single interpretable parameter. On unseen tracks, the proposed method achieved 33.16 s on Montreal and 46.05 s on Yas Marina, while tolerating more aggressive speed-profile scaling than the baselines and achieving the best lap times among the tested settings. Initial real-car experiments further support sim-to-real transfer on a 1:10-scale autonomous racing platform

Sim2Real-AD: A Modular Sim-to-Real Framework for Deploying VLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning in Real-World Autonomous Driving

Deploying reinforcement learning policies trained in simulation to real autonomous vehicles remains a fundamental challenge, particularly for VLM-guided RL frameworks whose policies are typically learned with simulator-native observations and simulator-coupled action semantics that are unavailable on physical platforms. This paper presents Sim2Real-AD, a modular framework for zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of CARLA-trained VLM-guided RL policies to full-scale vehicles without any real-world RL training data. The framework decomposes the transfer problem into four components: a Geometric Observation Bridge (GOB) that converts monocular front-view images into simulator-compatible bird's-eye-view (BEV) observations, a Physics-Aware Action Mapping (PAM) that translates policy outputs into platform-agnostic physical commands, a Two-Phase Progressive Training (TPT) strategy that stabilizes adaptation by separating action-space and observation-space transfer, and a Real-time Deployment Pipeline (RDP) that integrates perception, policy inference, control conversion, and safety monitoring for closed-loop execution. Simulation experiments show that the framework preserves the relative performance ordering of representative RL algorithms across different reward paradigms and validate the contribution of each module. Zero-shot deployment on a full-scale Ford E-Transit achieves success rates of 90%, 80%, and 75% in car-following, obstacle avoidance, and stop-sign interaction scenarios, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this study is among the first to demonstrate zero-shot closed-loop deployment of a CARLA-trained VLM-guided RL policy on a full-scale real vehicle without any real-world RL training data. The demo video and code are available at: https://zilin-huang.github.io/Sim2Real-AD-website/.

MonoSIM: An open source SIL framework for Ackermann Vehicular Systems with Monocular Vision

This paper presents an open-source Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) simulation platform designed for autonomous Ackerman vehicle research and education. The proposed framework focuses on simplicity, while making it easy to work with small-scale experimental setups, such as the XTENTH-CAR platform. The system was designed using open source tools, creating an environment with a monocular camera vision system to capture stimuli from it with minimal computational overhead through a sliding window based lane detection method. The platform supports a flexible algorithm testing and validation environment, allowing researchers to implement and compare various control strategies within an easy-to-use virtual environment. To validate the working of the platform, Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) algorithms were implemented within the SIL framework. The results confirm that the platform provides a reliable environment for algorithm verification, making it an ideal tool for future multi-agent system research, educational purposes, and low-cost AGV development. Our code is available at https://github.com/shantanu404/monosim.git.

Experimental Evaluation of Security Attacks on Self-Driving Car Platforms

Deep learning-based perception pipelines in autonomous ground vehicles are vulnerable to both adversarial manipulation and network-layer disruption. We present a systematic, on-hardware experimental evaluation of five attack classes: FGSM, PGD, man-in-the-middle (MitM), denial-of-service (DoS), and phantom attacks on low-cost autonomous vehicle platforms (JetRacer and Yahboom). Using a standardized 13-second experimental protocol and comprehensive automated logging, we systematically characterize three dimensions of attack behavior:(i) control deviation, (ii) computational cost, and (iii) runtime responsiveness. Our analysis reveals that distinct attack classes produce consistent and separable "fingerprints" across these dimensions: perception attacks (MitM output manipulation and phantom projection) generate high steering deviation signatures with nominal computational overhead, PGD produces combined steering perturbation and computational load signatures across multiple dimensions, and DoS exhibits frame rate and latency degradation signatures with minimal control-plane perturbation. We demonstrate that our fingerprinting framework generalizes across both digital attacks (adversarial perturbations, network manipulation) and environmental attacks (projected false features), providing a foundation for attack-aware monitoring systems and targeted, signature-based defense mechanisms.

Efficient Real-World Autonomous Racing via Attenuated Residual Policy Optimization

Residual policy learning (RPL), in which a learned policy refines a static base policy using deep reinforcement learning (DRL), has shown strong performance across various robotic applications. Its effectiveness is particularly evident in autonomous racing, a domain that serves as a challenging benchmark for real-world DRL. However, deploying RPL-based controllers introduces system complexity and increases inference latency. We address this by introducing an extension of RPL named attenuated residual policy optimization ($α$-RPO). Unlike standard RPL, $α$-RPO yields a standalone neural policy by progressively attenuating the base policy, which initially serves to bootstrap learning. Furthermore, this mechanism enables a form of privileged learning, where the base policy is permitted to use sensor modalities not required for final deployment. We design $α$-RPO to integrate seamlessly with PPO, ensuring that the attenuated influence of the base controller is dynamically compensated during policy optimization. We evaluate $α$-RPO by building a framework for 1:10-scaled autonomous racing around it. In both simulation and zero-shot real-world transfer to Roboracer cars, $α$-RPO not only reduces system complexity but also improves driving performance compared to baselines - demonstrating its practicality for robotic deployment. Our code is available at: https://github.com/raphajaner/arpo_racing.

From Code to Road: A Vehicle-in-the-Loop and Digital Twin-Based Framework for Central Car Server Testing in Autonomous Driving

Simulation is one of the most essential parts in the development stage of automotive software. However, purely virtual simulations often struggle to accurately capture all real-world factors due to limitations in modeling. To address this challenge, this work presents a test framework for automotive software on the centralized E/E architecture, which is a central car server in our case, based on Vehicle-in-the-Loop (ViL) and digital twin technology. The framework couples a physical test vehicle on a dynamometer test bench with its synchronized virtual counterpart in a simulation environment. Our approach provides a safe, reproducible, realistic, and cost-effective platform for validating autonomous driving algorithms with a centralized architecture. This test method eliminates the need to test individual physical ECUs and their communication protocols separately. In contrast to traditional ViL methods, the proposed framework runs the full autonomous driving software directly on the vehicle hardware after the simulation process, eliminating flashing and intermediate layers while enabling seamless virtual-physical integration and accurately reflecting centralized E/E behavior. In addition, incorporating mixed testing in both simulated and physical environments reduces the need for full hardware integration during the early stages of automotive development. Experimental case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in different test scenarios. These findings highlight the potential to reduce development and integration efforts for testing autonomous driving pipelines in the future.

Learning Geometric and Photometric Features from Panoramic LiDAR Scans for Outdoor Place Categorization

Semantic place categorization, which is one of the essential tasks for autonomous robots and vehicles, allows them to have capabilities of self-decision and navigation in unfamiliar environments. In particular, outdoor places are more difficult targets than indoor ones due to perceptual variations, such as dynamic illuminance over twenty-four hours and occlusions by cars and pedestrians. This paper presents a novel method of categorizing outdoor places using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which take omnidirectional depth/reflectance images obtained by 3D LiDARs as the inputs. First, we construct a large-scale outdoor place dataset named Multi-modal Panoramic 3D Outdoor (MPO) comprising two types of point clouds captured by two different LiDARs. They are labeled with six outdoor place categories: coast, forest, indoor/outdoor parking, residential area, and urban area. Second, we provide CNNs for LiDAR-based outdoor place categorization and evaluate our approach with the MPO dataset. Our results on the MPO dataset outperform traditional approaches and show the effectiveness in which we use both depth and reflectance modalities. To analyze our trained deep networks we visualize the learned features.