Learning-based Perception Contracts and Applications

Abstract

Perception modules are integral in many modern autonomous systems, but their accuracy can be subject to the vagaries of the environment. In this paper, we propose a learning-based approach that can automatically characterize the error of a perception module from data and use this for safe control. The proposed approach constructs a {\em perception contract (PC)\/} which generates a set that contains the ground-truth value that is being estimated by the perception module, with high probability. We apply the proposed approach to study a vision pipeline deployed on a quadcopter. With the proposed approach, we successfully constructed a PC for the vision pipeline. We then designed a control algorithm that utilizes the learned PC, with the goal of landing the quadcopter safely on a landing pad. Experiments show that with the learned PC, the control algorithm safely landed the quadcopter despite the error from the perception module, while the baseline algorithm without using the learned PC failed to do so