Method and system for addressing failure in an autonomous agent

A method for targeted failure management of an autonomous vehicle, the method comprising, at an autonomous vehicle:

• during a trip, checking for a 1st set of failures with a high-level processing subsystem configured to process environmental information from an environmental sensor subsystem;
• checking for a 2nd set of failures with a set of distributed processing subsystems arranged within a set of vehicle subsystems of the autonomous vehicle, the set of vehicle subsystems comprising at least one of:
• the environmental sensor subsystem;
• a control subsystem;
• a drive-by-wire subsystem comprising a set of actuators;
• or
• a vehicle chassis subsystem;
• in response to detecting one or more of the 1st set of failures, triggering one of a 1st set of failure responses, wherein at least a portion of the 1st set of failure responses comprises waiting until the autonomous vehicle has completed the trip before triggering an action;
• and
• in response to detecting one or more of the 2nd set of failures, triggering one of a 2nd set of failure responses.