SURF 2024: Hierarchical Testing for Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems

2024 SURF Hierarchical Testing for Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems

• Mentor: Richard Murray
• Co-mentor: Apurva Badithela

Project Description

Automatically identifying failure cases of safety-critical autonomous systems is important for mainstream deployment of these systems. A few examples of such safety-critical robotic systems is illustrated on the right. Since autonomous robotic systems are complex and their domain of operation is very large, it is not possible to exhaustively verify correctness of the autonomous system with respect to safety specifications. Oftentimes, these systems need to reason over both discrete as well as continuous inputs and parameters.

Current methods to identifying failures: Simulation-based falsification is the primary method of identifying failures.