This paper investigates runtime monitoring of perception systems. Perception is a critical component of high-integrity applications of robotics and autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars. In these applications, failure of perception systems may put human life at risk, and a broad adoption of these technologies requires the development of methodologies to guarantee and monitor safe operation. Despite the paramount importance of perception, currently there is no formal approach for system-level perception monitoring. In this paper, we formalize the problem of runtime fault detection and identification in perception systems and present a framework to model diagnostic information using a diagnostic graph. We then provide a set of deterministic, probabilistic, and learning-based algorithms that use diagnostic graphs to perform fault detection and identification. Moreover, we investigate fundamental limits and provide deterministic and probabilistic guarantees on the fault detection and identification results. We conclude the paper with an extensive experimental evaluation, which recreates several realistic failure modes in the LGSVL open-source autonomous driving simulator, and applies the proposed system monitors to a state-of-the-art autonomous driving software stack (Baidu's Apollo Auto). The results show that the proposed system monitors outperform baselines, have the potential of preventing accidents in realistic autonomous driving scenarios, and incur a negligible computational overhead.

Nonlinear estimation in robotics and vision is typically plagued with outliers due to wrong data association or incorrect detections from signal processing and machine learning methods. This article introduces two unifying formulations for outlier-robust estimation,generalized maximum consensus($\text{G}$-$\text{MC}$) andgeneralized truncated least squares($\text{G-TLS}$), and investigates fundamental limits, practical algorithms, and applications. Our first contribution is a proof that outlier-robust estimation isinapproximable:In the worst case, it is impossible to (even approximately) find the set of outliers, even with slower-than-polynomial-time algorithms (particularly, algorithms running inquasi-polynomialtime). As a second contribution, we review and extend two general-purpose algorithms. The first,adaptive trimming($\text{ADAPT}$), is combinatorial and is suitable for$\text{G}$-$\text{MC}$; the second,graduated nonconvexity($\text{GNC}$), is based on homotopy methods and is suitable for$\text{G-TLS}$. We extend$\text{ADAPT}$and$\text{GNC}$to the case where the user does not have prior knowledge of the inlier-noise statistics (or the statistics may vary over time) and is unable to guess a reasonable threshold to separate inliers from outliers (as the one commonly used in RANdom SAmple Consensus$(\text{RANSAC})$. We propose the firstminimally tunedalgorithms for outlier rejection, which dynamically decide how to separate inliers from outliers. Our third contribution is an evaluation of the proposed algorithms on robot perception problems: mesh registration, image-based object detection (shape alignment), and pose graph optimization.$\text{ADAPT}$and$\text{GNC}$execute in real time, are deterministic, outperform$\text{RANSAC}$, and are robust up to 80–90% outliers. Their minimally tuned versions also compare favorably with the state of the art, even though they do not rely on a noise bound for the inliers.

Perception is a critical component of high-integrity applications of robotics and autonomous systems, such as self-driving vehicles. In these applications, failure of perception systems may put human life at risk, and a broad adoption of these technologies requires the development of methodologies to guarantee and monitor safe operation. Despite the paramount importance of perception systems, currently there is no formal approach for system-level monitoring. In this work, we propose a mathematical model for runtime monitoring and fault detection and identification in perception systems. Towards this goal, we draw connections with the literature on diagnosability in multiprocessor systems, and generalize it to account for modules with heterogeneous outputs that interact over time. The resulting temporal diagnostic graphs (i) provide a framework to reason over the consistency of perception outputs –across modules and over time– thus enabling fault detection, (ii) allow us to establish formal guarantees on the maximum number of faults that can be uniquely identified in a given perception system, and (iii) enable the design of efficient algorithms for fault identification. We demonstrate our monitoring system, dubbed PerSyS, in realistic simulations using the LGSVL self-driving simulator and the Apollo Auto autonomy software stack, and show that PerSyS is able to detect failures in challenging scenarios (including scenarios that have caused self-driving car accidents in recent years), and is able to correctly identify faults while entailing a minimal computation overhead (< 5 ms on a single-core CPU).

Spatial perception is the backbone of many robotics applications, and spans a broad range of research problems, including localization and mapping, point cloud alignment, and relative pose estimation from camera images. Robust spatial perception is jeopardized by the presence of incorrect data association, and in general, outliers. Although techniques to handle outliers do exist, they can fail in unpredictable manners (e.g., RANSAC, robust estimators), or can have exponential runtime (e.g., branch-and-bound). In this paper, we advance the state of the art in outlier rejection by making three contributions. First, we show that even a simple linear instance of outlier rejection is inapproximable: in the worst-case one cannot design a quasi-polynomial time algorithm that computes an approximate solution efficiently. Our second contribution is to provide the first per-instance sub-optimality bounds to assess the approximation quality of a given outlier rejection outcome. Our third contribution is to propose a simple general-purpose algorithm, named adaptive trimming, to remove outliers. Our algorithm leverages recently-proposed global solvers that are able to solve outlier-free problems, and iteratively removes measurements with large errors. We demonstrate the proposed algorithm on three spatial perception problems: 3D registration, two-view geometry, and SLAM. The results show that our algorithm outperforms several state-of-the-art methods across applications while being a general-purpose method.