Coordination of Autonomous Vehicles: Taxonomy and Survey

In the near future, our streets will be populated by myriads of autonomous self-driving vehicles to serve our diverse mobility needs. This will raise the need to coordinate their movements in order to properly handle both access to shared resources (e.g., intersections and parking slots) and the execution of mobility tasks (e.g., platooning and ramp merging). In this paper, we firstly introduce the general issues associated to coordination of autonomous vehicles, by identifying and framing the key classes of coordination problems. Following, we overview the different approaches that can be adopted to manage such coordination problems, by classifying them in terms of the degree of autonomy in decision making that is left to autonomous vehicles during coordination. Finally, we overview some further peculiar challenges that research will have to address before autonomously coordinated vehicles can safely hit our streets.