Abstract:
Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are expected to fulfill the daily mobility needs of humans by offering more convenient and safer rides in the near future. However, to avail such tremendous benefits of autonomous vehicles, it is essential to understand the required infrastructure necessary to ensure the successful implementation of a high-level automated driving system (ADS) environment. The existing studies lack focus on roadway infrastructure readiness for autonomous vehicles extensively. Due to such lack of focus, two critical questions are still unresolved: “Is the current roadway infrastructure sufficient for such highly autonomous vehicles?” and “How can the current roadway infrastructure be assessed to understand whether they are sufficient for such high-level autonomous vehicles or not?”. A worldwide survey was conducted to answer the question and to determine essential roadway infrastructure required for the safe and successful deployment of highly autonomous vehicles. A total of 127 experts from academia, the AV industry, and Infrastructure Owner-Operators (IOOs) of 21 countries participated in this online survey. This study identified that GPS positioning and accuracy, real-time incident updates, detailed mapping, secure data sharing, and connectivity with infrastructure (V2X) are highly important digital roadway infrastructures for automated driving systems. Moreover, experts prioritize vulnerable road user facilities, winter road maintenance strategy, uniform road markings, and roadway visibility among physical roadway infrastructure as highly important. This study might be useful for different stakeholders of AVs to focus on various roadway infrastructure issues that need consideration.
Contributors: Zawad F S, Hossain K, Barzegaran J.