DPFuzzer: Discovering Safety Critical Vulnerabilities for Drone Path Planners

State-of-the-art drone path planners enable drones to autonomously travel through obstacles in GPS-denied, uncharted, cluttered environments. However, our investigation shows that path planners fail to maneuver drones correctly in specific scenarios, leading to incidents such as collisions. To minimize such risks, drone path planners should be tested thoroughly against diverse scenarios before deployment. Existing research for testing drones to uncover safety-critical vulnerabilities is only focused on flight control programs and is limited in the capability to generate diverse obstacle scenarios for testing drone path planners. In this work, we propose DPFuzzer, an automated framework for testing drone path planners. DPFuzzer is an evolutionary algorithm (EA) based testing framework. It aims to uncover vulnerabilities in drone path planners by generating diverse critical scenarios that can trigger vulnerabilities. To better guide the critical scenario generation, we introduce Environmental Risk Factor (ERF), a metric we propose, to abstract potential safety threats of scenarios. We evaluate DPFuzzer on state-of-the-art drone path planners and the experimental result shows that DPFuzzer can effectively find diverse vulnerabilities. Additionally, we demonstrate that these vulnerabilities are exploitable in the real world.