Biblio

Learning-enabled components (LECs) are widely used in cyber-physical systems (CPS) since they can handle the uncertainty and variability of the environment and increase the level of autonomy. However, it has been shown that LECs such as deep neural networks (DNN) are not robust and adversarial examples can cause the model to make a false prediction. The paper considers the problem of efficiently detecting adversarial examples in LECs used for regression in CPS. The proposed approach is based on inductive conformal prediction and uses a regression model based on variational autoencoder. The architecture allows to take into consideration both the input and the neural network prediction for detecting adversarial, and more generally, out-of-distribution examples. We demonstrate the method using an advanced emergency braking system implemented in an open source simulator for self-driving cars where a DNN is used to estimate the distance to an obstacle. The simulation results show that the method can effectively detect adversarial examples with a short detection delay.

With self-driving cars making their way on to our roads, we ask not what it would take for them to gain acceptance among consumers, but what impact they may have on other drivers. How they will be perceived and whether they will be trusted will likely have a major effect on traffic flow and vehicular safety. This work first undertakes an exploratory factor analysis to validate a trust scale for human-robot interaction and shows how previously validated metrics and general trust theory support a more complete model of trust that has increased applicability in the driving domain. We experimentally test this expanded model in the context of human-automation interaction during simulated driving, revealing how using these dimensions uncovers significant biases within human-robot trust that may have particularly deleterious effects when it comes to sharing our future roads with automated vehicles.

Robot Operating System (ROS) is becoming more and more important and is used widely by developers and researchers in various domains. One of the most important fields where it is being used is the self-driving cars industry. However, this framework is far from being totally secure, and the existing security breaches do not have robust solutions. In this paper we focus on the camera vulnerabilities, as it is often the most important source for the environment discovery and the decision-making process. We propose an unsupervised anomaly detection tool for detecting suspicious frames incoming from camera flows. Our solution is based on spatio-temporal autoencoders used to truthfully reconstruct the camera frames and detect abnormal ones by measuring the difference with the input. We test our approach on a real-word dataset, i.e. flows coming from embedded cameras of self-driving cars. Our solution outperforms the existing works on different scenarios.

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) play an essential role in ensuring safe, reliable and faster transportation with the help of an Intelligent Transportation system. The trustworthiness of vehicles in VANETs is extremely important to ensure the authenticity of messages and traffic information transmitted in extremely dynamic topographical conditions where vehicles move at high speed. False or misleading information may cause substantial traffic congestions, road accidents and may even cost lives. Many approaches exist in literature to measure the trustworthiness of GPS data and messages of an Autonomous Vehicle (AV). To the best of our knowledge, they have not considered the trustworthiness of other On-Board Unit (OBU) components of an AV, along with GPS data and transmitted messages, though they have a substantial relevance in overall vehicle trust measurement. In this paper, we introduce a novel model to measure the overall trustworthiness of an AV considering four different OBU components additionally. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated with a traffic simulation model developed by Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) using realistic traffic data and considering different levels of uncertainty.