  Self-driving Autonomous Vehicles (SAVs) are gaining more interest each
passing day by the industry as well as the general public. Tech and automobile
companies are investing huge amounts of capital in research and development of
SAVs to make sure they have a head start in the SAV market in the future. One
of the major hurdles in the way of SAVs making it to the public roads is the
lack of confidence of public in the safety aspect of SAVs. In order to assure
safety and provide confidence to the public in the safety of SAVs, researchers
around the world have used coverage-based testing for Verification and
Validation (V&V) and safety assurance of SAVs. The objective of this paper is
to investigate the coverage criteria proposed and coverage maximizing
techniques used by researchers in the last decade up till now, to assure safety
of SAVs. We conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) for this investigation
in our paper. We present a classification of existing research based on the
coverage criteria used. Several research gaps and research directions are also
provided in this SLR to enable further research in this domain. This paper
provides a body of knowledge in the domain of safety assurance of SAVs. We
believe the results of this SLR will be helpful in the progression of V&V and
safety assurance of SAVs.
