Ethical Decision Making in Autonomous Vehicles: Challenges and Research Progress

Ethical issues remain a significant concern for future large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles. Although machine ethics have been developed for a few decades, ethical decision making in autonomous driving imposes more complex and emerging challenges to which some dedicated efforts from academia, policymakers, and automakers have been devoted in the past few years. This paper reviews the efforts and progress associated with the various aspects of ethical challenges in autonomous vehicles. Based on the critical review, it is clear that a consistent solution for ethical challenges does not currently exist and recommendations are provided, to potentially encourage the involving players to collaborate to tackle the remaining challenges.