Natural Adversaries: Fuzzing Autonomous Vehicles with Realistic Roadside Object Placements
The emergence of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) has spurred research into testing the resilience of their perception systems, i.e., ensuring that they are not susceptible to critical misjudgements. It is important that these systems are tested not only with respect to other vehicles on the road, but also with respect to objects placed on the roadside. Trash bins, billboards, and greenery are examples of such objects, typically positioned according to guidelines developed for the human visual system, which may not align perfectly with the needs of AVs. Existing tests, however, usually focus on adversarial objects with conspicuous shapes or patches, which are ultimately unrealistic due to their unnatural appearance and reliance on white-box knowledge. In this work, we introduce a black-box attack on AV perception systems that creates realistic adversarial scenarios (i.e., satisfying road design guidelines) by manipulating the positions of common roadside objects and without resorting to “unnatural” adversarial patches. In particular, we propose TrashFuzz, a fuzzing algorithm that finds scenarios in which the placement of these objects leads to substantial AV misperceptions — such as mistaking a traffic light’s colour — with the overall goal of causing traffic-law violations. To ensure realism, these scenarios must satisfy several rules encoding regulatory guidelines governing the placement of objects on public streets. We implemented and evaluated these attacks on the Apollo autonomous driving system, finding that TrashFuzz induced violations of 15 out of 24 traffic laws.
Tue 19 MayDisplayed time zone: Seoul change
11:00 - 12:30 | Autonomous Systems & Robotics TestingIndustry / Research Papers at Room 101 Chair(s): Khouloud Gaaloul University of Michigan - Dearborn | ||
11:00 25mTalk | Dynasto: Validity-Aware Dynamic–Static Parameter Optimization for Autonomous Driving TestingDistinguished Paper Award Research Papers Dmytro Humeniuk Polytechnique Montréal, Mohammad Hamdaqa Polytechnique Montreal, Houssem Ben Braiek Polytechnique Montreal, Amel Bennaceur The Open University, UK, Foutse Khomh Polytechnique Montréal | ||
11:25 25mTalk | Natural Adversaries: Fuzzing Autonomous Vehicles with Realistic Roadside Object Placements Research Papers Yang Sun Singapore Management University, Haoyu Wang School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Chris Poskitt Singapore Management University, Jun Sun Singapore Management University DOI Pre-print | ||
11:50 15mTalk | Metamorphic Testing of Vision-Language Action–Enabled Robots Research Papers Pablo Valle Mondragon University, Sergio Segura SCORE Lab, I3US Institute, Universidad de Sevilla, Seville, Spain, Shaukat Ali Simula Research Laboratory and Oslo Metropolitan University, Aitor Arrieta Mondragon University Pre-print | ||
12:05 25mTalk | Assessing Vision–Language Models for Perception in Autonomous Underwater Robotic Software Industry Muhammad Yousaf Simula Research Laboratory, Aitor Arrieta Mondragon University, Shaukat Ali Simula Research Laboratory and Oslo Metropolitan University, Paolo Arcaini National Institute of Informatics, Shuai Wang DNV AS | ||