Khuram Shahzad

fortunately, giving vehicles or generally any technical device, features of autonomy raises some issues. They are primarily associated with the need to "teach" machine to think logi‐ cally, of course, in a limited range of the nature of the mission, as well as to make the right decisions in both typical and atypical situations. Currently, despite the attempts to give the machines features of artificial intelligence that should enable autonomous operations to a limited extent, this area is still being continuously developed, there are no concrete solutions

Autonomous vehicle technology is still being developed, which can be seen even with re‐ ports of attempts to construct biomechanical vehicles which are imitating the actions of ani‐ mals or even humans. Recently a new trend has appeared: concept of many autonomous vehicles collectively working together to pursue a specific tasks and achieve a common goal.

In this book, scientists from research institutions and universities of various countries of the world present their achievements in the field of autonomous vehicles. According to the pre‐ sented messages, the impact of these vehicles on the improvement of human life is invalua‐ ble especially because of the wide field of its application. I hope that this book will provide closer insight on some of the problems related to the autonomy of various vehicles and will

**Andrzej Zak**

Poland

Polish Naval Academy

that can be applied in real life, and there is still a lot to be done.

VIII Preface

This is considered the latest trend in the development of robotics.

inspire further research in the field of robotics, in general.

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/64064

#### **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 infrastruc‐ ture suggests new methodologies where vehicles are not limited to onboard capabili‐ ties. 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.

**Keywords:** cloud robotics, cloud computing, big data, crowdsourcing, open-source, open-access, vehicular cloud
