PIPages
Labs

Marcelo d'Amorim

North Carolina State University, NC·Computer Science

Self-driving cars must be thoroughly tested before they go on public roads, but testing them in real traffic is slow, limited and can be unsafe. Instead, developers plug their autonomous driving systems (ADS) into high-fidelity simulators and run test drives along routes with static and moving obstacles.

Fields

Computer Science

Engineering

Topics

autonomous driving systems

self-driving cars

autonomous vehicles

Grants
1 known grant, through Jun 2027

What they work on

  1. Improve the efficiency of simulation-based testing of autonomous driving systems by using risk signals from anomaly detectors during simulations to find infractions within a fixed time budget.
  2. Reduce duplicate infraction reports by using semantic information embedded in parts of a simulation to group and deduplicate failures found by testing tools.
  3. Increase the realism of simulated driving tests, for example beyond a single self-driving vehicle, by incorporating real-life data and human input.

More about the research

This project asks how simulation-based testing can find more real safety failures, faster and more realistically.

Why it matters

Better simulation testing could help developers catch safety problems in self-driving software before deployment, without the cost and danger of large-scale road testing. Finding more distinct, realistic failures within limited testing time could contribute to safer autonomous vehicles and road safety.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

SHF: Small: E2R2--A Comprehensive Approach to Improve Simulation-based Testing of Autonomous Driving Systems

NSF · Jul 2024 – Jun 2027

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The school

North Carolina State University: 40 labs on PI Pages, $717M a year on research, 603 research doctorates a year.

More about North Carolina State University

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