RobIL — Israeli program for research and development of autonomous UGV: Performance evaluation methodology

RobIL program is a collaborative effort of several leading Israeli academic institutions and industries in the field of robotics. The current objective of the program is to develop an Autonomous Off-Road Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV). The intention is to deal through this project with some of the most urgent challenges in the field of autonomous vehicles. One of these challenges, is the lack of efficient Safety Performance Verification technique, as the existing tools for hardware and software reliability and safety engineering do not provide a comprehensive solution regarding algorithms that are based on Artificial Intelligent (AI) and Machine Learning. In order to deal with this gap a novel methodology that is based on statistical testing in simulated environment, is presented. In this work the RobIL UGV project with special emphasis on the performance and safety verification methodology is presented.