Research in Autonomous Driving – A Historic Bibliometric View of the Research Development in Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving has become an increasingly relevant issue for policymakers, the industry, service providers, infrastructure companies, and science. This study shows how bibliometrics can be used to identify the major technological aspects of an emerging research field such as autonomous driving. We examine the most influential publications and identify research fronts of scientific activities until 2017 based on a bibliometric literature analysis. Using the science mapping approach, publications in the research field of autonomous driving were retrieved from Web of Science and then structured using the bibliometric software BibTechMon by the AIT (Austrian Institute of Technology). At the time of our analysis, we identified four research fronts in the field of autonomous driving: (I) Autonomous Vehicles and Infrastructure, (II) Driver Assistance Systems, (III) Autonomous Mobile Robots, and (IV) IntraFace, i.e., automated facial image analysis. Researchers were working extensively on technologies that support the navigation and collection of data. Our analysis indicates that research was moving towards autonomous navigation and infrastructure in the urban environment. A noticeable number of publications focused on technologies for environment detection in automated vehicles. Still, research pointed at the technological challenges to make automated driving safe.