DARPA Program · 2019–2020

DARPA Assured Autonomy

Safety assurance for learning-enabled autonomous systems — developing formal verification, rare event testing, and out-of-distribution detection for cyber-physical systems with learned components.

Program Goals

Creating technology for continual assurance of Learning-Enabled Cyber-Physical Systems — safety guarantees at design time that are monitored and updated during operation.

3
Challenge Domains (Air, Land, Sea)
2019–20
My Contribution Period

Working with the Vanderbilt ISIS team under Professor Janos Sztipanovits, I contributed to two core thrusts under the Assured Autonomy program: rare event failure testing for learning-enabled controllers, and out-of-distribution detection for runtime assurance monitoring.

Research Works

Rare Event Failure Test Case Generation in Learning-Enabled-Controllers

Rare Event Failure Test Case Generation in Learning-Enabled-Controllers

H. Vardhan, J. Sztipanovits
ACM ICMLT 2021
TestingSafetyLEC
Reduced Robust Random Cut Forest for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Reduced Robust Random Cut Forest for Out-of-Distribution Detection

H. Vardhan, J. Sztipanovits
IJMLC 2022
OOD DetectionRuntime Assurance

Media Coverage

DARPA Official
Progressing Towards Assuredly Safer Autonomous Systems
Phase 1 report discussing the Vanderbilt/Penn teams working on the AUV challenge.
2020
DARPA Official
DARPA Assured Autonomy Seeks to Guarantee Safety of Learning-enabled Autonomous Systems
Program announcement by Sandeep Neema.
August 2017
CSIS
The DARPA Perspective on AI and Autonomy at the DoD
DARPA Deputy Director discusses Assured Autonomy program impact.
October 2024
DOT&E (Department of Defense)
Assured Autonomy — What DOT&E's Following
May 2022
Vanderbilt ISIS
Assured Autonomy at Vanderbilt — Project Website
ISIS project website covering formal verification, assurance monitoring, and the BlueROV2 AUV platform.