Skip to main content
Assured Autonomy Tools Portal
Continual Assurance of Learning-Enabled, Cyber-Physical Systems (LE-CPS)

Towards Verification of Neural Networks for Small Unmanned Aircraft Collision Avoidance

Abstract

The ACAS X family of aircraft collision avoidance systems uses large numeric lookup tables to make decisions. Recent work used a deep neural network to approximate and compress a collision avoidance table, and simulations showed that the neural network performance was comparable to the original table. Consequently, neural network representations are being explored for use on small aircraft with limited storage capacity. However, the black-box nature of deep neural networks raises safety concerns because simulation results are not exhaustive. This work takes steps towards addressing these concerns by applying formal methods to analyze the behavior of collision avoidance neural networks both in isolation and in a closed-loop system. We evaluate our approach on a specific set of collision avoidance networks and show that even though the networks are not always locally robust, their closed-loop behavior ensures that they will not reach an unsafe (collision) state.

Year of Publication
2020
DOI
10.1109/DASC50938.2020.9256616