Simulating the Effects of Sensor Failures on Autonomous Vehicles for Safety Evaluation

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are increasingly becoming a reality, enabled by advances in sensing technologies, intelligent control systems, and real-time data processing. For AVs to operate safely and effectively, they must maintain a reliable perception of their surroundings and internal state. However, sensor failures, whether due to noise, malfunction, or degradation, can compromise this perception and lead to incorrect localization or unsafe decisions by the autonomous control system. While modern AV systems often combine data from multiple sensors to mitigate such risks through sensor fusion techniques (e.g., Kalman filtering), the extent to which these systems remain resilient under faulty conditions remains an open question. This work presents a simulation-based fault injection framework to assess the impact of sensor failures on AVs’ behavior. The framework enables structured testing of autonomous driving software under controlled fault conditions, allowing researchers to observe how specific sensor failures affect system performance. To demonstrate its applicability, an experimental campaign was conducted using the CARLA simulator integrated with the Autoware autonomous driving stack. A multi-segment urban driving scenario was executed using a modified version of CARLA’s Scenario Runner to support Autoware-based evaluations. Faults were injected simulating LiDAR, GNSS, and IMU sensor failures in different route scenarios. The fault types considered in this study include silent sensor failures and severe noise. The results obtained by emulating sensor failures in our chosen system under test, Autoware, show that faults in LiDAR and IMU gyroscope have the most critical impact, often leading to erratic motion and collisions. In contrast, faults in GNSS and IMU accelerometers were well tolerated. This demonstrates the ability of the framework to investigate the fault-tolerance of AVs in the presence of critical sensor failures.