conference paper

Doppelgänger Test Generation for Revealing Bugs in Autonomous Driving Software

2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

Publication Date

May 1, 2023

Author(s)

Yuqi Huai, Yuntianyi Chen, Sumaya Almanee, Tuan Ngo, Xiang Liao, Ziwen Wan, Qi Alfred Chen, Joshua Garcia

Abstract

Vehicles controlled by autonomous driving software (ADS) are expected to bring many social and economic benefits, but at the current stage not being broadly used due to concerns with regard to their safety. Virtual tests, where autonomous vehicles are tested in software simulation, are common practices because they are more efficient and safer compared to field operational tests. Specifically, search-based approaches are used to find particularly critical situations. These approaches provide an opportunity to automatically generate tests; however, system-atically producing bug-revealing tests for ADS remains a major challenge. To address this challenge, we introduce DoppelTest, a test generation approach for ADSes that utilizes a genetic algorithm to discover bug-revealing violations by generating scenarios with multiple autonomous vehicles that account for traffic control (e.g., traffic signals and stop signs). Our extensive evaluation shows that DoppelTest can efficiently discover 123 bug-revealing violations for a production-grade ADS (Baidu Apollo) which we then classify into 8 unique bug categories.

Suggested Citation
Yuqi Huai, Yuntianyi Chen, Sumaya Almanee, Tuan Ngo, Xiang Liao, Ziwen Wan, Qi Alfred Chen and Joshua Garcia (2023) “Doppelgänger Test Generation for Revealing Bugs in Autonomous Driving Software”, in 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), pp. 2591–2603. Available at: 10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00216.