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 sensor failure


From Faults to Features: Pretraining to Learn Robust Representations against Sensor Failures

Neural Information Processing Systems

Machine learning models play a key role in safety-critical applications, such as autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems, where their robustness during inference is essential to ensure reliable operation.


Is Your HD Map Constructor Reliable under Sensor Corruptions?

Neural Information Processing Systems

Driving systems often rely on high-definition (HD) maps for precise environmental information, which is crucial for planning and navigation. While current HD map constructors perform well under ideal conditions, their resilience to real-world challenges, \eg, adverse weather and sensor failures, is not well understood, raising safety concerns. This work introduces MapBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of HD map construction methods against various sensor corruptions. Our benchmark encompasses a total of 29 types of corruptions that occur from cameras and LiDAR sensors. Extensive evaluations across 31 HD map constructors reveal significant performance degradation of existing methods under adverse weather conditions and sensor failures, underscoring critical safety concerns. We identify effective strategies for enhancing robustness, including innovative approaches that leverage multi-modal fusion, advanced data augmentation, and architectural techniques. These insights provide a pathway for developing more reliable HD map construction methods, which are essential for the advancement of autonomous driving technology. The benchmark toolkit and affiliated code and model checkpoints have been made publicly accessible.


World Model Robustness via Surprise Recognition

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI systems deployed in the real world must contend with distractions and out-of-distribution (OOD) noise that can destabilize their policies and lead to unsafe behavior . While robust training can reduce sensitivity to some forms of noise, it is infeasible to anticipate all possible OOD conditions. T o mitigate this issue, we develop an algorithm that leverages a world model's inherent measure of surprise to reduce the impact of noise in world model-based reinforcement learning agents. W e introduce both multi-representation and single-representation rejection sampling, enabling robustness to settings with multiple faulty sensors or a single faulty sensor . While the introduction of noise typically degrades agent performance, we show that our techniques preserve performance relative to baselines under varying types and levels of noise across multiple environments within self-driving simulation domains (CARLA and Safety Gymnasium). Furthermore, we demonstrate that our methods enhance the stability of two state-of-the-art world models with markedly different underlying architectures: Cosmos and DreamerV3.


Risk Assessment of an Autonomous Underwater Snake Robot in Confined Operations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The growing interest in ocean discovery imposes a need for inspection and intervention in confined and demanding environments. Eely's slender shape, in addition to its ability to change its body configurations, makes articulated underwater robots an adequate option for such environments. However, operation of Eely in such environments imposes demanding requirements on the system, as it must deal with uncertain and unstructured environments, extreme environmental conditions, and reduced navigational capabilities. This paper proposes a Bayesian approach to assess the risks of losing Eely during two mission scenarios. The goal of this work is to improve Eely's performance and the likelihood of mission success. Sensitivity analysis results are presented in order to demonstrate the causes having the highest impact on losing Eely.


Is Your HD Map Constructor Reliable under Sensor Corruptions?

Neural Information Processing Systems

Driving systems often rely on high-definition (HD) maps for precise environmental information, which is crucial for planning and navigation. While current HD map constructors perform well under ideal conditions, their resilience to real-world challenges, \eg, adverse weather and sensor failures, is not well understood, raising safety concerns. This work introduces MapBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of HD map construction methods against various sensor corruptions. Our benchmark encompasses a total of 29 types of corruptions that occur from cameras and LiDAR sensors. Extensive evaluations across 31 HD map constructors reveal significant performance degradation of existing methods under adverse weather conditions and sensor failures, underscoring critical safety concerns.


AI-Powered Anomaly Detection with Blockchain for Real-Time Security and Reliability in Autonomous Vehicles

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Autonomous Vehicles (AV) proliferation brings important and pressing security and reliability issues that must be dealt with to guarantee public safety and help their widespread adoption. The contribution of the proposed research is towards achieving more secure, reliable, and trustworthy autonomous transportation system by providing more capabilities for anomaly detection, data provenance, and real-time response in safety critical AV deployments. In this research, we develop a new framework that combines the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for real-time anomaly detection with blockchain technology to detect and prevent any malicious activity including sensor failures in AVs. Through Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, our approach continually monitors associated multi-sensor data streams to detect anomalous patterns that may represent cyberattacks as well as hardware malfunctions. Further, this framework employs a decentralized platform for securely storing sensor data and anomaly alerts in a blockchain ledger for data incorruptibility and authenticity, while offering transparent forensic features. Moreover, immediate automated response mechanisms are deployed using smart contracts when anomalies are found. This makes the AV system more resilient to attacks from both cyberspace and hardware component failure. Besides, we identify potential challenges of scalability in handling high frequency sensor data, computational constraint in resource constrained environment, and of distributed data storage in terms of privacy.


Car Sensors Health Monitoring by Verification Based on Autoencoder and Random Forest Regression

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Driver assistance systems provide a wide range of crucial services, including closely monitoring the condition of vehicles. This paper showcases a groundbreaking sensor health monitoring system designed for the automotive industry. The ingenious system leverages cutting-edge techniques to process data collected from various vehicle sensors. It compares their outputs within the Electronic Control Unit (ECU) to evaluate the health of each sensor. To unravel the intricate correlations between sensor data, an extensive exploration of machine learning and deep learning methodologies was conducted. Through meticulous analysis, the most correlated sensor data were identified. These valuable insights were then utilized to provide accurate estimations of sensor values. Among the diverse learning methods examined, the combination of autoencoders for detecting sensor failures and random forest regression for estimating sensor values proved to yield the most impressive outcomes. A statistical model using the normal distribution has been developed to identify possible sensor failures proactively. By comparing the actual values of the sensors with their estimated values based on correlated sensors, faulty sensors can be detected early. When a defective sensor is detected, both the driver and the maintenance department are promptly alerted. Additionally, the system replaces the value of the faulty sensor with the estimated value obtained through analysis. This proactive approach was evaluated using data from twenty essential sensors in the Saipa's Quick vehicle's ECU, resulting in an impressive accuracy rate of 99\%.


Deep Learning for Motion Classification in Ankle Exoskeletons Using Surface EMG and IMU Signals

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ankle exoskeletons have garnered considerable interest for their potential to enhance mobility and reduce fall risks, particularly among the aging population. The efficacy of these devices relies on accurate real-time prediction of the user's intended movements through sensor-based inputs. This paper presents a novel motion prediction framework that integrates three Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and eight surface Electromyography (sEMG) sensors to capture both kinematic and muscular activity data. A comprehensive set of activities, representative of everyday movements in barrier-free environments, was recorded for the purpose. Our findings reveal that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) slightly outperform Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks on a dataset of five motion tasks, achieving classification accuracies of $96.5 \pm 0.8 \%$ and $87.5 \pm 2.9 \%$, respectively. Furthermore, we demonstrate the system's proficiency in transfer learning, enabling accurate motion classification for new subjects using just ten samples per class for finetuning. The robustness of the model is demonstrated by its resilience to sensor failures resulting in absent signals, maintaining reliable performance in real-world scenarios. These results underscore the potential of deep learning algorithms to enhance the functionality and safety of ankle exoskeletons, ultimately improving their usability in daily life.


Hybrid Attention for Robust RGB-T Pedestrian Detection in Real-World Conditions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multispectral pedestrian detection has gained significant attention in recent years, particularly in autonomous driving applications. To address the challenges posed by adversarial illumination conditions, the combination of thermal and visible images has demonstrated its advantages. However, existing fusion methods rely on the critical assumption that the RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) image pairs are fully overlapping. These assumptions often do not hold in real-world applications, where only partial overlap between images can occur due to sensors configuration. Moreover, sensor failure can cause loss of information in one modality. In this paper, we propose a novel module called the Hybrid Attention (HA) mechanism as our main contribution to mitigate performance degradation caused by partial overlap and sensor failure, i.e. when at least part of the scene is acquired by only one sensor. We propose an improved RGB-T fusion algorithm, robust against partial overlap and sensor failure encountered during inference in real-world applications. We also leverage a mobile-friendly backbone to cope with resource constraints in embedded systems. We conducted experiments by simulating various partial overlap and sensor failure scenarios to evaluate the performance of our proposed method. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, showcasing its superiority in handling real-world challenges.


Using machine learning for fault detection in lighthouse light sensors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Lighthouses play a crucial role in ensuring maritime safety by signaling hazardous areas such as dangerous coastlines, shoals, reefs, and rocks, along with aiding harbor entries and aerial navigation. This is achieved through the use of photoresistor sensors that activate or deactivate based on the time of day. However, a significant issue is the potential malfunction of these sensors, leading to the gradual misalignment of the light's operational timing. This paper introduces an innovative machine learning-based approach for automatically detecting such malfunctions. We evaluate four distinct algorithms: decision trees, random forest, extreme gradient boosting, and multi-layer perceptron. Our findings indicate that the multi-layer perceptron is the most effective, capable of detecting timing discrepancies as small as 10-15 minutes. This accuracy makes it a highly efficient tool for automating the detection of faults in lighthouse light sensors.