Environment-Centric Safety Requirements for Autonomous Unmanned Systems

Autonomous unmanned systems (AUS) emerge to take place of human operators in harsh or dangerous environments. However, such environments are typically dynamic and uncertain, causing unanticipated accidents when autonomous behaviours are no longer safe. Even though safe autonomy has been considered in the literature, little has been done to address the environmental safety requirements of AUS systematically. In this paper, we conduct a systematical literature review and set up a taxonomy of environment-centric safety requirements for AUS. We then analyse the neglected issues to suggest several new research directions towards the vision of environmental-centric safe autonomy.