Towards fault tolerant perception for autonomous vehicles: Local fusion

Many robust sensor fusion strategies have been developed in order to reliably detect the surrounding environments of an autonomous vehicle. However, in real situations there is always the possibility that sensors or other components may fail. Thus, internal modules and sensors need to be monitored to ensure their proper function. This paper introduces a general view of a perception architecture designed to detect and classify obstacles in an autonomous vehicle´s environment using a fault tolerant framework, whereas elaborates the object detection and local fusion modules proposed in order to achieve the modularity and real-time process required by the system.