ANTI-CARLA: An Adversarial Testing Framework for Autonomous Vehicles in CARLA

Abstract

Despite recent advances in autonomous driving systems, accidents such as the fatal Uber crash in 2018 show these systems are still susceptible to edge cases. Such systems need to be thoroughly tested and validated before being deployed in the real world to avoid such events. Testing in open-world scenarios can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. These challenges can be addressed by using driving simulators such as CARLA instead. A key part of such tests is adversarial testing, in which the goal is to find scenarios that lead to failures of the given system. While several independent efforts in adversarial testing have been made, a well-established testing framework that enables adaptive stress testing has yet to be made available for CARLA. We therefore propose ANTI-CARLA, an adversarial testing framework in CARLA. The operating conditions in which a given system should be tested are specified in a scenario description language. The framework offers an adversarial search mechanism that searches for operating conditions that will fail the tested system. In this way, ANTI-CARLA extends the CARLA simulator with the capability of performing adversarial testing on any given driving pipeline. We use ANTI-CARLA to test the driving pipeline trained with Learning By Cheating (LBC) approach. The simulation results demonstrate that ANTI-CARLA can effectively and automatically find a range of failure cases despite LBC reaching an accuracy of 100% in the CARLA benchmark.

Publication
2022 IEEE 25th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC)