A Real-time Critical-scenario-generation Framework for Testing Autonomous Driving System

In order to find the most likely failure scenarios which may occur under certain given operation domain, critical-scenario-based test is supposed as an effective and widely used method, which gives suggestions for designers to improve the developing algorithm. However, for the state of art, critical-scenario generation approaches commonly utilize random-search or reinforcement learning methods to generate series of scenarios for a specific algorithm, which takes amounts of computing resource for testing a developing target that is always changing, and inapplicable for testing a real-time system. In this paper, we proposed a real-time critical-scenario-generation (RTCSG) framework to address the above challenges. In our framework, an aggressive-driving algorithm is proposed in controlling the virtual agent vehicles, a specially designed cost function is presented to guide scenarios to evolve towards critical conditions, and a self-adaptive coefficient iteration is designed that enable the approach to operate successfully in different conditions. With our proposed method, the critical-scenarios can be directly generated for the target under test which is a black-box system, and the real-time critical-scenario test can be brought into reality. The simulation results show that our approach is able to obtain more critical scenarios in most conditions than current methods, with a higher stability of success. For a real-time testing, our approach improves the efficiency around 16 times.