PERIOD · Pursuing Efficient Reliability of Object Detection for automotive and aerospace applications

Pursuing Efficient Reliability of Object Detection for automotive and aerospace applications

The complexity and sensitivity to perturbation of object detection frameworks is one of the most critical threads to the reliability of autonomous vehicles. The huge amount of hardware resources required to process frames in real time and the parallel structure of modern hardware accelerators for object detention frameworks exacerbate both the probability of a radiation-induced corruption and the impact of this corruption in the output correctness. The radiation-induced error rates in modern devices have been found to be hundreds to thousands of times higher than the limit imposed by the international reliability standard for autonomous vehicles. It is then of paramount importance to understand the fault mechanisms, to track the fault propagation in the computing architecture and the software to, ultimately, design efficient and effective hardening solutions. Ensuring a high reliability of object detection has a strategic importance for the European society. Object detection is essential to implement self-driving cars and autonomous aerospace systems. Only a significant increase of the reliability of current (and future) object detection frameworks will allow the employment of autonomous vehicles in large scale. The main objective of PERIOD is actually to increase the safety of people driving, Europe security, and burst space exploration. PERIOD will give guidelines on how to produce reliable computing architectures and software to disclose autonomy for space applications, helping ESA to maintain a leading role in the international space market. Finally, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) also require object detection. PERIOD will help the European union in developing more reliable frameworks for increasing the union security. As a result, PERIOD will strongly contribute to support crucial research and strategic sectors with consequent European excellence and competitiveness in the exponentially growing autonomous vehicles market, with the final aim of improving quality and safety of life in Europe. Thus, the main objectives of PERIOD are: 1. Understand fault generation and propagation in current and future parallel, heterogeneous, and programmable computing architectures. 2. Identify the code portions or hardware resources whose corruption is responsible for erroneous detection, and formalize the distinction between tolerable and critical errors. 3. Develop and validate software and architectural hardware solutions to significantly reduce the error rate of current and next-generation object detection frameworks. 4. Increase the public's understanding on object detection reliability and disseminate the PERIOD results through frequent outreach activities dedicated to non-specialists (general public and high school students), with the final purpose of teaching reliability concepts in the autonomous vehicles era, encouraging the public interest in research careers, the training of skilled researchers, and the growth of new jobs and investments

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз