Autonomy Safety Testing Environment

Recent advancements in sensor simulation tools [2] have improved our ability to model radar, lidar, camera, and GPS with software/hardware in the loop. Of course, our ability to model the physics of heavy trucks [3] is quite mature as well. To address the challenge of developing the STE, we will provide our autonomy algorithms as Government Furnished Equipment (GFE). The focus of this topic is: 1) to build an environment that mirrors actual test data to provide a departure point for Monte Carlo simulations. 2) research the failure modes for autonomy algorithms within the capabilities of current sensor models and 3) simulate the corner cases that would exercise these failure modes. This topic is not focused on improving physics-based simulation of heavy trucks or building better sensor models. Neither do we seek to develop new algorithms for autonomous behavior, but rather to leverage existing GFE autonomy algorithms to study the open research question of how we can test these algorithms in simulation, and certify that they are safe to the fullest extent possible within current simulation environments.