Automated Driving System Challenges in Rural Appalachia

The development of autonomous driving technology has predominantly focused on urban and suburban areas. Deployment of automated driving systems in regions such as rural Appalachia present unique challenges such as narrow and winding roads and degradation of localization. Scenarios in rural Appalachia that required manual intervention by a driver during autonomous driving experiments were investigated across three unique routes. The research identified the technological and environmental limitations that contributed to these interventions and how they may differ from urban settings. The goal was to provide insights into the factors that hinder autonomous vehicle performance in rural areas and guide the development of more adaptable and robust systems capable of operating reliably in diverse environments, extending the benefits of autonomous driving to rural populations and ensuring equitable access to advancements in transportation. Driving experiments resulted in 1,884 total interventions and revealed trends in the reasons and locations for intervention across the three routes. In rural areas the leading causes of takeover were localization issues, accounting for 30.4% of total events, environmental traffic uncertainties, responsible for 20.3%, and object detection challenges, comprising 15.2%. Whereas urban settings saw roundabouts, environmental traffic uncertainties, and stoplight detection errors as the most common reasons with respective percentages of 19.5%, 17.7%, and 15.4%, revealing key differences between environments.