Toward Benchmarking and Assessing the Safety and Robustness of Autonomous Driving on Safety-Critical Scenarios

Autonomous driving has made significant progress in both academia and industry, including performance improvements in perception tasks and the development of end-to-end autonomous driving systems. However, the safety and robustness assessment of autonomous driving has not received sufficient attention. Current evaluations of autonomous driving are typically conducted in natural driving scenarios. However, accidents often occur in edge cases, also known as safety-critical scenarios. These safety-critical scenarios are difficult to collect, and there is currently no clear definition of what constitutes a safety-critical scenario. In this work, we explore the safety and robustness of autonomous driving in safety-critical scenarios. First, we provide a definition of safety-critical scenarios, including static traffic scenarios such as adversarial attack scenarios and natural distribution shifts, as well as dynamic traffic scenarios such as accident scenarios. Then, we develop an autonomous driving test framework to comprehensively evaluate autonomous driving systems, encompassing not only the assessment of perception modules but also system-level evaluations. Our work systematically constructs a safety verification process for autonomous driving, providing technical support for the industry to establish standardized test framework.