Kayotee: A Fault Injection-based System to Assess the Safety and Reliability of Autonomous Vehicles to Faults and Errors
This addresses safety concerns for autonomous vehicles, which is critical for public, government, and manufacturers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing fault injection methods applied to a new domain.
The authors tackled the problem of assessing safety and reliability in autonomous vehicles by developing Kayotee, a fault injection-based tool that systematically injects faults into software and hardware components, and they used it to study a proprietary Nvidia ADS technology, demonstrating its capability to characterize fault propagation across multiple levels.
Fully autonomous vehicles (AVs), i.e., AVs with autonomy level 5, are expected to dominate road transportation in the near-future and contribute trillions of dollars to the global economy. The general public, government organizations, and manufacturers all have significant concern regarding resiliency and safety standards of the autonomous driving system (ADS) of AVs . In this work, we proposed and developed (a) `Kayotee' - a fault injection-based tool to systematically inject faults into software and hardware components of the ADS to assess the safety and reliability of AVs to faults and errors, and (b) an ontology model to characterize errors and safety violations impacting reliability and safety of AVs. Kayotee is capable of characterizing fault propagation and resiliency at different levels - (a) hardware, (b) software, (c) vehicle dynamics, and (d) traffic resilience. We used Kayotee to study a proprietary ADS technology built by Nvidia corporation and are currently applying Kayotee to other open-source ADS systems.