The goals of Automated Driving Systems (ADS) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) include reduction in accidental deaths, enhanced mobility for differently abled people, and an overall improvement in the quality of life for the general public. Such systems typically operate in open and highly uncertain environments for which robust perception systems are essential. However, despite the tremendous theoretical and experimental progress in computer vision, machine learning, and sensor fusion, the form and conditions under which guarantees should be provided for perception components is still unclear. The state-of-the-art is to perform scenario-based evaluation of data against ground truth values, but this has only limited impact. The lack of formal metrics to analyze the quality of perception systems has already led to several catastrophic incidents and a plateau in ADS/ADAS development. This project develops formal languages for specifying and evaluating the quality and robustness of perception sub-systems within ADS and ADAS applications. To enable broader dissemination of this technology, the project develops graduate and undergraduate curricula to train engineers in the use of such methods, and new educational modules to explain the challenges in developing safe and robust ADS for outreach and public engagement activities. To broaden participation in computing, the investigators target the inclusion of undergraduate women in research and development phases through summer internships.
The formal language developed in this project is based on a new spatio-temporal logic pioneered by the investigators. This logic allows one to simultaneously perform temporal reasoning about streaming perception data, and spatially reason about objects both within a single frame of the data and across frames. The project also develops quantitative semantics for this logic, which provides the user with quantifiable quality metrics for perception sub-systems. These semantics enable comparisons between different perception systems and architectures. Crucially, the formal language facilitates the process of abstracting away implementation details, which in turn allows system designers and regulators to specify assumptions and guarantees for system performance at a higher-level of abstraction. An interesting benefit of this formal language is that it enables querying of databases with perception data for specific driving scenarios without the need for the highly manual process of creating ground truth annotations. Such a formal language currently does not exist, and this is a huge impediment to building a thriving marketplace for perception components used in safety-critical systems. This framework sets the foundation for a requirements language between suppliers of perception components and automotive companies. The open source and publicly available software tools developed in this project will assist with testing of perception systems by engineers and governmental agencies.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
