Cloud Robotics and Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Recently, a good amount of research has been focused on the development of the autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicles possess great potential in numerous challenging applications, for example, autonomous armoured fighting vehicles, automated highway systems, etc. To enable the usage of autonomous vehicles in such challenging applications, it is important to ensure the safety, efficiency, reliability and robustness of the system. Most of the existing implementations of the autonomous vehicles operate as standalone systems limited to onboard capabilities (computations, memory, data, etc.), which limit their potential and performance in real-world applications. The advent of the Internet and emerging advances in the cloud infrastructure suggests new methodologies where vehicles are not limited to onboard capabilities. Processing is also performed remotely on cloud to support different operations and to increase the proficiency of decision-making. This chapter surveys the research to date in the evolution of autonomous vehicles, cloud and cloud-enabled autonomous vehicles, with the limitations of existing systems, research challenges and possible future directions. The chapter can help new researchers in the field to understand and evaluate different approaches for the design of the autonomous vehicular systems.