A Retargetable Fault Injection Framework for Safety Validation of Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles use Electronic Control Units running complex software to improve passenger comfort and safety. To test safety of in-vehicle electronics, the ISO 26262 standard on functional safety recommends using fault injection during component and system-level design. A Fault Injection Framework (FIF) induces hard-to-trigger hardware and software faults at runtime, enabling analysis of fault propagation effects. The growing number and complexity of diverse interacting components in vehicles demands a versatile FIF at the vehicle level. In this paper, we present a novel retargetable FIF based on debugger interfaces available on many target systems. We validated our FIF in three Hardware-In-the-Loop setups for autonomous driving based on the NXP BlueBox prototyping platform. To trigger a fault injection process, we developed an interactive user interface based on Robot Operating System, which also visualized vehicle system health. Our retargetable debugger-based fault injection mechanism confirmed safety properties and identified safety shortcomings of various automotive systems.