Verification and Validation of a Vision-Based Landing System for Autonomous VTOL Air Taxis

作     者：Bansal, Ayoosh Wang, Duo Yeghiazaryan, Mikael Li, Yangge Tao, Chuyuan Yoon, Hyung-Jin Arora, Prateek Papachristos, Christos Voulgaris, Petros Mitra, Sayan Sha, Lui Hovakimyan, Naira 

作者机构：University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Illinois Urbana61801 United States University of Nevada RenoNV89557 United States Tennessee Technological University CookevilleTN38505 United States Postdoctoral Research Associate Computer Science 201 North Goodwin Avenue UrbanaIL61801 United States Mechanical Engineering Department 1664 N. Virginia Street RenoNV89557 United States UIUC Mechanical Science & Engineering Department 105 S Mathews Ave UrbanaIL61801 United States Graduate Student Electrical and Computer Engineering 306 N. Wright St. UrbanaIL61801 United States Mechanical Science & Engineering Department 105 S Mathews Ave UrbanaIL61801 United States Mechanical Engineering Department 1 William L Jones Dr CookevilleTN38505 United States Department of Computer Science & Engineering 1664 N. Virginia Street RenoNV89557 United States Department of Computer Science & Engineering 1664 N. Virginia Street RenoNV89557 United States Mechanical Engineering Department 1664 N. Virginia Street RenoNV89557 United States Electrical and Computer Engineering 306 N. Wright St. UrbanaIL61801 United States Donald B. Gillies Chair in Computer Science Computer Science 201 North Goodwin Avenue UrbanaIL61801 United States Mechanical Science & Engineering Department 105 S Mathews Ave UrbanaIL61801 United States 

出 版 物：《arXiv》 (arXiv)

年 卷 期：2024年

核心收录：

主　　题：Mass transportation 

摘      要：Autonomous air taxis are poised to revolutionize urban mass transportation. A key challenge inhibiting their adoption is ensuring the safety and reliability of the autonomy solutions that will control these vehicles. Validating these solutions on full-scale air taxis in the real world presents complexities, risks, and costs that further convolute the challenge of ensuring safety and reliability of these autonomous vehicles. Verification and Validation (V&V) frameworks play a crucial role in the design and development of highly reliable systems by formally verifying safety properties and validating algorithm behavior across diverse operational scenarios. Advancements in high-fidelity simulators have significantly enhanced their capability to emulate real-world conditions, encouraging their use for validating autonomous air taxi solutions, especially during early development stages. This evolution underscores the growing importance of simulation environments, not only as complementary tools to real-world testing but as essential platforms for evaluating algorithms in a controlled, reproducible, and scalable manner. This work presents a V&V framework for a vision-based landing system for air taxis with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities. Specifically, we use Verse, a tool for formal verification, to model and verify the safety of the system by obtaining and analyzing the reachable sets. To conduct this analysis, we utilize a photorealistic simulation environment. The simulation environment, built on Unreal Engine, provides realistic terrain, weather, and sensor characteristics to emulate real-world conditions with high fidelity. To validate the safety analysis results, we conduct extensive scenario-based testing to assess the reachability set and robustness of the landing algorithm in various conditions. This approach showcases the representativeness of high-fidelity simulators, offering an effective means to analyze and refine algorithms before real-wor