Developing a simulator to aid in the design of a safety interlock for self-driving cars

Self-driving cars have tremendous potential to be safer than human drivers, but are complex systems for which evaluating safety is challenging: using a statistical approach requires self-driving cars to have clocked on the order of billions of miles of driving to present convincing evidence. Thus there is potential in exploring a new design architecture for self-driving cars in which a small, trusted module of code cooperates with the main controller to ensure safety while being easily verifiable; we call this the safety Interlock. This thesis focuses on the scenario of an ego car driving in a single, straight lane behind a lead car that may suddenly brake. We first propose and prove, using formal verification, an algorithm for Interlock to prevent collision by maintaining a safe separation distance that allows the ego car to stop in time. We then present a simulation program developed using the Processing programming language, which provides visual confirmation of the efficacy of the Interlock algorithm, and is designed to be extensible to more complex road scenarios.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Leong Feng Ping, Angela.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Daniel N. Jackson.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129842

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129842