Assessment and assurance of autonomous vehicle safety

Safety is the biggest roadblock in deploying autonomous vehicles (AVs) on public roads as exemplified by recent headline-making accidents. Ensuring AV safety is as important as developing technology that enables self-driving functionality and requires more attention. This thesis has a few goals. First, it organizes and analyzes the current state-of-the-art methods for evaluating AV safety, elaborating on their advantages, drawbacks and potential directions for improvement. Second, it studies the recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes to highlight the importance of prioritizing the assessment and assurance of safety-critical systems like AVs over business interests. Then it demonstrates two methods of assessing AV safety: post-mortem data analysis and end-to-end fault injection on AVs. Post-mortem data analysis of the disengagement and crash reports from various manufacturers testing their AVs in California, USA, shows that AV technology needs further development to be as safe as human drivers and is not ready to be deployed unsupervised on public roads. The end-to-end fault injection framework can be used to assess and uncover safety-critical faults of the entire AV stack using a realistic driving simulator framework.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2021

Author dc:creator

• Cyriac, James

Contributors dc:contributor

• Iyer, Ravishankar

• Autonomous Vehicle
• Safety assessment
• Fault Injection

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2020 James Cyriac

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/109609

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F109609