Cooperative Automated Vehicles: a Review of Opportunities and Challenges in Socially Intelligent Vehicles Beyond Networking

TL;DR

This paper reviews the importance of cooperation and social-AI capabilities in automated vehicles, highlighting challenges and opportunities for socially intelligent autonomous driving beyond basic networking.

Contribution

It emphasizes the need for cooperative social-AI skills in automated vehicles, reviewing current research and identifying future challenges beyond connectivity.

Findings

Cooperation enhances automated vehicle safety and efficiency.

Social-AI capabilities are essential for future autonomous vehicle interactions.

Current research addresses cooperation but faces significant technical challenges.

Abstract

The connected automated vehicle has been often touted as a technology that will become pervasive in society in the near future. One can view an automated vehicle as having Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, being able to self-drive, sense its surroundings, recognise objects in its vicinity, and perform reasoning and decision-making. Rather than being stand alone, we examine the need for automated vehicles to cooperate and interact within their socio-cyber-physical environments, including the problems cooperation will solve, but also the issues and challenges. We review current work in cooperation for automated vehicles, based on selected examples from the literature. We conclude noting the need for the ability to behave cooperatively as a form of social-AI capability for automated vehicles, beyond sensing the immediate environment and beyond the underlying networking technology.