Collaborative autonomous driving—a survey of solution approaches and future challenges

Sooner than expected, roads will be populated with a plethora of connected and autonomous vehicles serving diverse mobility needs. Rather than being stand-alone, vehicles will be required to cooperate and coordinate with each other, referred to as cooperative driving executing the mobility tasks properly. Cooperative driving leverages Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication technologies aiming to carry out cooperative functionalities: (i) cooperative sensing and (ii) cooperative maneuvering. To better equip the readers with background knowledge on the topic, we firstly provide the detailed taxonomy section describing the underlying concepts and various aspects of cooperation in cooperative driving. In this survey, we review the current solution approaches in cooperation for autonomous vehicles, based on various cooperative driving applications, i.e., smart car parking, lane change and merge, intersection management, and platooning. The role and functionality of such cooperation become more crucial in platooning use-cases, which is why we also focus on providing more details of platooning use-cases and focus on one of the challenges, electing a leader in high-level platooning. Following, we highlight a crucial range of research gaps and open challenges that need to be addressed before cooperative autonomous vehicles hit the roads. We believe that this survey will assist the researchers in better understanding vehicular cooperation, its various scenarios, solution approaches, and challenges.