A research team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory has developed a tool to help the U.S. Air Force test and evaluate autonomous vehicles in interactive environments.
The Safe Testing of Autonomy in Complex, Interactive Environments, or TACE, provides live, virtual and constructive environments for AFWERX’s Autonomy Prime testbeds and serves as a verification mechanism for safety runtime assurance, Johns Hopkins APL said Tuesday.
TACE is placed between a vehicle’s safety-critical control and autonomy systems where it monitors commands from the autonomy to the autopilot and passes data, such as position and speed and orientation, back to the autonomy.
To validate the safety assertions of the vehicle, TACE provides a runtime assurance capability that checks failure or violation of safety constraints.
“We recognized the critical need to accelerate autonomy technologies, and over the past ten years we developed TACE to meet various sponsor needs. We look forward to expanding these technologies for Autonomy Prime,” said Chris Eaton, APL’s project manager for TACE.
