On Using Real-Time Reachability for the Safety Assurance of Machine Learning Controllers

Over the last decade, advances in machine learning and sensing technology have paved the way for the belief that safe, accessible, and convenient autonomous vehicles may be realized in the near future. Despite the prolific competencies of machine learning models for learning the nuances of sensing, actuation, and control, they are notoriously difficult to assure. The challenge here is that some models, such as neural networks, are “black box” in nature, making verification and validation difficult, and sometimes infeasible. Moreover, these models are often tasked with operating in uncertain and dynamic environments where design time assurance may only be partially transferable. Thus, it is critical to monitor these components at runtime. One approach for providing runtime assurance of systems with unverified components is the simplex architecture, where an unverified component is wrapped with a safety controller and a switching logic designed to prevent dangerous behavior. In this paper, we propose the use of a real-time reachability algorithm for the implementation of such an architecture for the safety assurance of a 1/10 scale open source autonomous vehicle platform known as F1/10. The reachability algorithm (a) provides provable guarantees of safety, and (b) is used to detect potentially unsafe scenarios. In our approach, the need to analyze the underlying controller is abstracted away, instead focusing on the effects of the controller’s decisions on the system’s future states. We demonstrate the efficacy of our architecture through experiments conducted both in simulation and on an embedded hardware platform.