Route Planning Considerations for Autonomous Vehicles

The steadfast emergence of AVs promises many advantages, including an enhanced driving and transportation experience for humans, and increased automation of the production and distribution cycles for businesses. Meanwhile, route planning tools have evolved greatly over recent years and have grown popular across the different sectors. Despite this evolution, we argue in this work that current route planning approaches are not readily applicable to AVs and their emerging requirements. A smooth and safe introduction of AVs into the road networks is therefore challenging, especially as the road is shared with vehicles at different levels of autonomy. In light of this, we review the enabling technologies for more capable route planning techniques and describe the inevitable elements and considerations for routing AVs in a mixed-traffic environment.