Addressing the IEEE AV Test Challenge with Scenic and VerifAI
This work addresses the challenge of verifying safety in autonomous vehicles for researchers and developers, but it is incremental as it builds on previous formal methods.
The paper tackled the problem of systematically testing autonomous vehicles in simulation for the IEEE AV Test Challenge by using a formal approach with Scenic and VerifAI, resulting in the identification of concrete failure scenarios for the Apollo autopilot.
This paper summarizes our formal approach to testing autonomous vehicles (AVs) in simulation for the IEEE AV Test Challenge. We demonstrate a systematic testing framework leveraging our previous work on formally-driven simulation for intelligent cyber-physical systems. First, to model and generate interactive scenarios involving multiple agents, we used Scenic, a probabilistic programming language for specifying scenarios. A Scenic program defines an abstract scenario as a distribution over configurations of physical objects and their behaviors over time. Sampling from an abstract scenario yields many different concrete scenarios which can be run as test cases for the AV. Starting from a Scenic program encoding an abstract driving scenario, we can use the VerifAI toolkit to search within the scenario for failure cases with respect to multiple AV evaluation metrics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our testing framework by identifying concrete failure scenarios for an open-source autopilot, Apollo, starting from a variety of realistic traffic scenarios.