Argus: Resilience-Oriented Safety Assurance Framework for End-to-End ADSs

TL;DR

Argus is a runtime framework that enhances the safety and resilience of end-to-end autonomous driving systems by monitoring hazards and intervening to prevent safety violations, significantly improving driving performance.

Contribution

We introduce Argus, a novel resilience-oriented framework that continuously monitors and mitigates hazards in end-to-end ADSs, demonstrating substantial safety improvements.

Findings

Improves ADS driving score by up to 150.30%

Prevents up to 64.38% of safety violations

Adds minimal time overhead

Abstract

End-to-end autonomous driving systems (ADSs), with their strong capabilities in environmental perception and generalizable driving decisions, are attracting growing attention from both academia and industry. However, once deployed on public roads, ADSs are inevitably exposed to diverse driving hazards that may compromise safety and degrade system performance. This raises a strong demand for resilience of ADSs, particularly the capability to continuously monitor driving hazards and adaptively respond to potential safety violations, which is crucial for maintaining robust driving behaviors in complex driving scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose a runtime resilience-oriented framework, Argus, to mitigate the driving hazards, thus preventing potential safety violations and improving the driving performance of an ADS. Argus continuously monitors the trajectories generated by the ADS for potential hazards and, whenever the EGO vehicle is deemed unsafe, seamlessly takes control through a hazard mitigator. We integrate Argus with three state-of-the-art end-to-end ADSs, i.e., TCP, UniAD and VAD. Our evaluation has demonstrated that Argus effectively and efficiently enhances the resilience of ADSs, improving the driving score of the ADS by up to 150.30% on average, and preventing up to 64.38% of the violations, with little additional time overhead.