# Enabling Technologies for Urban Smart Mobility: Recent Trends, Opportunities and Challenges
## 4 Smart Mobility Services and Applications
### Autonomous Vehicles  
The automation and robotization of tasks, with the increasing availability of new sensors and software, is something we currently assist in several domains, from industry to call centers, applicational support to clients, among many others. One of the applications of automation that we can call the most ambitious is the Autonomous Vehicle (AV). If we classify AVs as ambitious it is because they involve people and because, in some cases, we may be talking about situations in which their physical integrity is at stake and even life or death situations. The availability of AVs is undeniably a growing trend, and today we are witnessing an exponential evolution until a few years from now we can reach the complete automation of vehicles. The technologies that are present in cities today allow us to anticipate that in the coming years we will have frank developments regarding theautomation of vehicles for the daily commuting that all citizens need to undertake for their daily tasks [80]. This will undoubtedly revolutionize urban mobility as we know it in a very drastic way. The infrastructures of cities will have to undergo significant changes in order to adapt to this new reality. The advent of 5G will be a fundamental piece of this puzzle, with a speed 100 times faster than 4G [81]. The Automotive Vehicle Readiness Index refers to the Netherlands as the country most prepared, in terms of infrastructure, to accommodate future AVs, followed by Singapore and the United Kingdom. Three main characteristics can be referred to as fundamental when it comes to changing infrastructure in cities [81]:  
* Lane marking: these markings are not the best for today's vehicles. It is an aspect that will necessarily have to be improved to the point that they can be read efficiently by machines.
* Roadside sensors: this type of sensor should be included in sidewalks, curbs and lanes. In this way, it will be possible for AVs to be aware of the environment that surrounds them and thus act in a preventive way to possible situations of danger.
* Smart signage: image recognition is currently used to read traffic signs. In the future, it is expected that the signals will be able to send a signal that can be read by machines and thus facilitate the reading of the signals by the autonomous vehicles. The introduction of AVs is considered to have the following consequences in cities [82]:
* Providing a safer and more reliable means of transport,
* Reducing the number of accidents,
* Reducing the need for human intervention during driving,
* Reducing traffic congestion
* Allowing elderly people or people with disabilities to make their lives easier
* Elimination of traffic lights as autonomous vehicles will be able to efficiently set priorities
* Reducing/eliminating the time spent searching for parking spaces.  
On another hand, some of the challenges facing the widespread adoption of AVs include [83; 84; 43; 82; 83; 84]:  
* Perception, planning, control and ethics
* Data privacy
* Transmission security
* Processing latency
* Energy efficiency.