Achieving intelligent performance in autonomous on-road driving

This paper describes NIST’s efforts in evaluating what it will take to achieve autonomous human-level driving skills in terms of time and funding. NIST has approached this problem from several perspectives: considering the current state-of-the-art in autonomous navigation and extrapolating from there, decomposing the tasks identified by the Department of Transportation for on-road driving and comparing that with accomplishments to date, analyzing computing power requirements by comparison with the human brain, and conducting a Delphi Forecast using the expert researchers in the field of autonomous driving. A detailed description of each of these approaches is provided along with the major finding from each approach and an overall picture of what it will take to achieve human level driving skills in autonomous vehicles.