Context-Aware Sensor Uncertainty Estimation for Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Sensor uncertainty significantly affects the performance of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Sensor uncertainty is predominantly linked to sensor specifications, and because sensor behaviors change dynamically, the machine learning approach is not suitable for learning them. This paper presents a novel learning approach for predicting sensor performance in challenging environments. The design of our approach incorporates both epistemic uncertainties, which are related to the lack of knowledge, and aleatoric uncertainties, which are related to the stochastic nature of the data acquisition process. The proposed approach combines a state-based model with a predictive model, where the former estimates the uncertainty in the current environment and the latter finds the correlations between the source of the uncertainty and its environmental characteristics. The proposed approach has been evaluated on real data to predict the uncertainties associated with global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs), showing that our approach can predict sensor uncertainty with high confidence.