A Formal Safety Characterization of Advanced Driver Assist Systems in the Car-Following Regime with Scenario-Sampling

Abstract: The capability to follow a lead-vehicle and avoid rear-end collisions is one of the most important functionalities for human drivers and various Advanced Driver Assist Systems (ADAS). Existing safety performance justification of the car-following systems either relies on simple concrete scenarios with biased surrogate metrics or requires a significantly long driving distance for risk observation and inference. In this paper, we propose a guaranteed unbiased and sampling efficient scenario-based safety evaluation framework inspired by the previous work on $\epsilon\delta$-almost safe set quantification. The proposal characterizes the complete safety performance of the test subject in the car-following regime. The performance of the proposed method is also demonstrated in challenging cases including some widely adopted car-following decision-making modules and the commercially available Openpilot driving stack by CommaAI.