Autonomous Vehicle Considerations

The advent of autonomous vehicles will inevitably bring numerous benefits to society. Some of these potential benefits are reduced traffic congestion, reduced greenhouse gases, changes in the perceived value of travel time, and numerous changes to parking and other urban infrastructure. However, the implementation of autonomous vehicles has been marred with challenges and obstacles that have delayed the plans of multiple large tech and automotive companies. Some notable issues relating to autonomous vehicles pertain to liability questions, ethical dilemmas, planning for the transition to fully autonomous vehicles, and public trust and acceptance. These difficult issues, in combination with the significant time and monetary investments from titans of industry, have led to a significant collection of research papers and articles that document, outline, and review literature discussing all aspects of autonomous vehicles. The sheer amount and speed of changes in this field make it difficult to understand how all these issues tie together. The purpose of this research is to review the major categories and sub-categories of existing literature on autonomous vehicles and provide a big-picture structure in the form of a taxonomy for autonomous vehicle research. With a taxonomy created, natural language processing is used to create a system able to classify literature relating to autonomous vehicles. It is intended for this research to ultimately allow those unfamiliar with the current state of autonomous vehicles to quickly and easily understand how a specific article they encounter may tie into the big picture