Are We Ready for Snow-tonomous Driving? Challenges Toward Robust Automated Driving in Extreme Weather

원문 초록

Automated driving has gained remarkable momentum over the past decade, with both industry and academia investing substantial resources in developing perception and control solutions to advance vehicle autonomy. However, these efforts have largely focused on clear-weather scenarios, leaving harsh conditions, such as snow, rain, and fog, comparatively understudied. As a result, inclement weather remains one of the most significant hurdles for autonomous vehicles, often leading to substantial performance degradation in downstream perception and control tasks. In this paper, we present insights from the EU-funded Horizon Europe project ROADVIEW, which aims to develop robust, weather-aware perception and control modules for connected and automated vehicles operating under severe conditions, including snow, rain, and fog. Drawing on four years of large-scale development and real-world demonstrations across multiple vehicle platforms in different locations, we identify ten key challenges that hinder the development of weather-resilient autonomy, including data scarcity, domain shifts, limitations in multimodal perception, control robustness, and validation gaps, among others. We summarize these challenges and lessons learned toward enabling reliable snow-autonomous driving, highlighting critical directions for future research and standardization.