AI-Enabled Low-Level Signal Anomaly Detection in Virtualized Electronic Architectures for Autonomous Vehicles

The safety of autonomous vehicles depends not only on perception and planning, but also on the correctness of low-level electronic signals that connect controllers and actuators. Errors at this interface, caused by hardware degradation, timing violations, software faults, or unexpected interactions, can lead to unsafe behavior even when high-level autonomy functions operate correctly. Existing safety mechanisms primarily focus on system behavior, trajectories, or controller design, leaving actuator-bound command streams largely unmonitored. This paper proposes a low-level, AI-enabled anomaly-detection layer for autonomous vehicle architectures. The core idea is to embed a lightweight observer within a virtualized master controller to monitor control-signal streams in real time without interfering with the primary control logic. The proposed framework combines a stacked LSTM sequence classifier with rule-based safety constraints and context-aware monitoring to detect physically implausible or temporally inconsistent command behavior before actuation. A proof-of-concept simulation study was conducted to evaluate the practicality of the approach using overtaking scenarios in a co-simulated high-level and low-level environment. The results show that the proposed concept can identify severe abnormal low-level behavior and provide preliminary warning/error indications, supporting its potential as a complementary safety layer at the control-to-actuation interface.