While recent developments in autonomous vehicle (AV) technology highlight substantial progress, we lack tools for rigorous and scalable testing. Real-world testing, the @math evaluation environment, places the public in danger, and, due to the rare nature of accidents, will require billions of miles in order to statistically validate performance claims. We implement a simulation framework that can test an entire modern autonomous driving system, including, in particular, systems that employ deep-learning perception and control algorithms. Using adaptive importance-sampling methods to accelerate rare-event probability evaluation, we estimate the probability of an accident under a base distribution governing standard traffic behavior. We demonstrate our framework on a highway scenario, accelerating system evaluation by @math - @math times over naive Monte Carlo sampling methods and @math - @math times (where @math is the number of processors) over real-world testing.
Hybrid automata model systems with both digital and analog components, such as embedded control programs. Many verification tasks for such programs can be expressed as reachability problems for hybrid automata. By improving on previous decidability and undecidability results, we identify a boundary between decidability and undecidability for the reachability problem of hybrid automata. On the positive side, we give an (optimal) PSPACE reachability algorithm for the case of initialized rectangular automata, where all analog variables follow independent trajectories within piecewise-linear envelopes and are reinitialized whenever the envelope changes. Our algorithm is based on the construction of a timed automaton that contains all reachability information about a given initialized rectangular automaton. The translation has practical significance for verification, because it guarantees the termination of symbolic procedures for the reachability analysis of initialized rectangular automata. The translation also preserves the?-languages of initialized rectangular automata with bounded nondeterminism. On the negative side, we show that several slight generalizations of initialized rectangular automata lead to an undecidable reachability problem. In particular, we prove that the reachability problem is undecidable for timed automata augmented with a single stopwatch. The aim of this course is to introduce some fundamental concepts from the area of hybrid systems, that is dynamical systems that involve the interaction of continuous (real valued) states and discrete (finite valued) states. Applications where these types of dynamics play a prominent role will be highlighted. We will introduce general methods for investigating properties such as existence of solutions, reachability and decidability of hybrid systems. The methods will be demonstrated on the motivating applications. Students who successfully complete the course should be able to appreciate the diversity of phenomena that arise in hybrid systems and how discrete “discrete” entities and concepts such as automata, decidability and bisimulation can coexist with continuous entities and concepts, such as differential equations. 