Deep Learning Based Data Fusion for Sensor Fault Diagnosis and Tolerance in Autonomous Vehicles

Environmental perception is one of the key technologies to realize autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicles are often equipped with multiple sensors to form a multi-source environmental perception system. Those sensors are very sensitive to light or background conditions, which will introduce a variety of global and local fault signals that bring great safety risks to autonomous driving system during long-term running. In this paper, a real-time data fusion network with fault diagnosis and fault tolerance mechanism is designed. By introducing prior features to realize the lightweight network, the features of the input data can be extracted in real time. A new sensor reliability evaluation method is proposed by calculating the global and local confidence of sensors. Through the temporal and spatial correlation between sensor data, the sensor redundancy is utilized to diagnose the local and global confidence level of sensor data in real time, eliminate the fault data, and ensure the accuracy and reliability of data fusion. Experiments show that the network achieves state-of-the-art results in speed and accuracy, and can accurately detect the location of the target when some sensors are out of focus or out of order. The fusion framework proposed in this paper is proved to be effective for intelligent vehicles in terms of real-time performance and reliability.