Timed Rule-Based Supervision of an End-to-End Autonomous Parking Policy

Abstract

We study whether a manually specified runtime supervisor can correct recurring failures of an existing end-to-end parking policy in a fixed CARLA parking lot. The vision-based Transformer architecture is inherited from Yang et al.; our contribution is a timed, rule-based Parametric Safety Shield (PSS) applied to its control outputs. The PSS uses hand-calibrated speed, position, and duration thresholds to intervene in observed failure modes, including boundary exits, delayed braking, and stalled or oscillatory control. In the reported closed-loop evaluation, 16 held-out target slots and six initial poses are each evaluated in four rounds (384 attempts per configuration). Target success increases from 327/384 (85.16%) for the retrained policy to 375/384 (97.66%) with the PSS; mean position and orientation errors among successful attempts are 0.21m and 0.33 degrees. These results show an improvement within this simulator setup. The repeated attempts share one map, vehicle, and sensor configuration, and the PSS uses simulator world coordinates; thus the results do not establish generalization to other lots or real vehicles, or a formal safety guarantee.