LawBreaker: An approach for specifying traffic laws and fuzzing autonomous vehicles

• Main Authors: SUN, Yang, POSKITT, Christopher M., SUN, Jun, CHEN, Yuqi, YANG, Zijiang
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Autonomous vehicles; Traffic laws; Fuzzing; STL; LGSVL; Apollo; Software Engineering; Transportation; Transportation Law
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7745; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/8748/viewcontent/3551349.3556897_pvoa.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) must be tested thoroughly before they can be deployed in autonomous vehicles. High-fidelity simulators allow them to be tested against diverse scenarios, including those that are difficult to recreate in real-world testing grounds. While previous approaches have shown that test cases can be generated automatically, they tend to focus on weak oracles (e.g. reaching the destination without collisions) without assessing whether the journey itself was undertaken safely and satisfied the law. In this work, we propose LawBreaker, an automated framework for testing ADSs against real-world traffic laws, which is designed to be compatible with different scenario description languages. LawBreaker provides a rich driver-oriented specification language for describing traffic laws, and a fuzzing engine that searches for different ways of violating them by maximising specification coverage. To evaluate our approach, we implemented it for Apollo+LGSVL and specified the traffic laws of China. LawBreaker was able to find 14 violations of these laws, including 173 test cases that caused accidents.