System-Level Analysis of Module Uncertainty Quantification in the Autonomy Pipeline

We present a novel perspective on the design, use, and role of uncertainty measures for learned modules in an autonomous system. While in the current literature uncertainty measures are produced for standalone modules without considering the broader system context, in our work we explicitly consider the role of decision-making under uncertainty in illuminating how “good” an uncertainty measure is. Our insights are centered around quantifying the ways in which being uncertainty-aware makes a system more robust. Firstly, we use level set generation tools to produce a measure for system robustness and use this measure to compare system designs, thus placing uncertainty quantification in the context of system performance and evaluation metrics. Secondly, we use the concept of specification generation from systems theory to produce a formulation under which a designer can simultaneously constrain the properties of an uncertainty measure and analyze the efficacy of the decision-making-under-uncertainty algorithm used by the system. We apply our analyses to two real-world and complex autonomous systems, one for autonomous driving and another for aircraft runway incursion detection, helping to form a toolbox for an uncertainty-aware system designer to produce more effective and robust systems.