Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely heavily on sensors to perceive their surrounding environment and then make decisions and act on them. However, these sensors have weaknesses, and are prone to failure, resulting in decision errors by vehicle controllers that pose significant challenges to their safe operation. To mitigate sensor failures, it is necessary to understand how they occur and how they affect the vehicle’s behavior so that fault-tolerant and fault-masking strategies can be applied. This survey covers 108 publications and presents an overview of the sensors used in AVs today, categorizes the sensor’s failures that can occur, such as radar interferences, ambiguities detection, or camera image failures, and provides an overview of mitigation strategies such as sensor fusion, redundancy, and sensor calibration. It also provides insights into research areas critical to improving safety in the autonomous vehicle industry, so that new or more in-depth research may emerge.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming widely used for supporting multiple heterogeneous missions, requiring continuous evolution and adaptation of the implemented services. This scenario calls for the definition of architectural abstractions that support the integration of service-variants, in particular the notion of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) for services composition, to fulfill application-specified performance and dependability requirements. In this paper, we discuss the problems of using SOA (a non-deterministic approach) in UAVs (a real-time based embedded system) and the safety issues that such environment may raise. We then put forward a framework to tackle the identified challenges and propose potential solutions considering the opportunities and threats of using SOA in UAVs.

During the last decade, common automotive vehicles received an increased number of electronic components running embedded software, enabling them to become more efficient, comfortable, safer and usable, unfortunately this is also causing an increase of vehicle recalls to fix software defects. Aware of this problem, the automotive industry has been adopting software development and safety standards from other industries, as well as developing its own. However, none has been used so-far as base for certification processes, meaning that there is no obligation to have independent parties attesting that the best development, safety or architectural practices are being followed. With the publication of ISO 26262, manufacturers, suppliers and automotive organizations are finally able to agree on a common schema for the certification of automotive software. This paper describes the most relevant standards that have been used in the automotive industry, namely for software development, stressing the development and safety lifecycle. It then addresses software certification and some of the main challenges it poses to this industry.