Bench2Drive-Robust: Benchmarking Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving under Deployment Perturbations

TL;DR

Bench2Drive-Robust introduces a device-centric benchmark for evaluating the robustness of closed-loop autonomous driving systems under realistic deployment perturbations, highlighting challenges not captured by traditional image corruption tests.

Contribution

It is the first to systematically evaluate system-level deployment perturbations in closed-loop autonomous driving, emphasizing their impact on robustness and stability.

Findings

Deployment perturbations significantly degrade driving performance.

Traditional image-level tests do not fully capture real-world robustness challenges.

Benchmark encourages development of deployment-aware robust autonomous driving systems.

Abstract

Robustness is a critical requirement for deploying autonomous driving systems in the real world. Existing robustness benchmarks for autonomous driving have made important progress in studying the effects of image-level corruptions, such as adverse weather or camera degradation, on perception modules and open-loop planning outputs. However, deployment can also involve system-level imperfections, such as inference latency and ego-state estimation errors, which remain less studied in closed-loop E2E-AD evaluation. These imperfections can accumulate through the feedback loop and destabilize control. In this work, we present Bench2Drive-Robust, to our knowledge the first device-centric robustness benchmark for closed-loop end-to-end autonomous driving under realistic deployment perturbations. We systematically evaluate deployment-oriented perturbations arising from three major sources: camera-stream failures (frame drop, partial observation), ego-state estimation errors (GPS noise, and speed or odometry errors), and compute-induced control delay (model inference delay). We evaluate representative end-to-end driving methods and analyze their robustness under different perturbation severities. Our results show that these deployment-related perturbations can substantially degrade closed-loop driving performance, revealing robustness challenges that are not fully captured by conventional image-level corruption evaluations. By establishing a closed-loop evaluation protocol and demonstrating the substantial impact of these deployment-oriented perturbations, Bench2Drive-Robust defines practical robustness problems for end-to-end autonomous driving and encourages further research on deployment-aware robust driving systems.