Sensor Protection and Fault Detection: Application to Autonomous Vehicles

Motivated by a crash that occurred due to a sensor malfunction in the Indy Autonomous Challenge, this article takes a secure estimation-inspired approach to sensor protection and fault detection and applies it to path following for autonomous vehicles. We introduce the notion of sensor protection and then use this notion to formulate an Optimal Sensor Protection Problem. We adapt existing algorithms for secure estimation to the protected sensor paradigm. Finally, these ideas are applied to a nonlinear model of a car-like robot with realistic model parameters and provide extensive numerical simulations to test the efficacy of this approach on nonlinear models.