  Automated Driving Systems (ADS) hold great potential to increase safety,
mobility, and equity. However, without public acceptance, none of these
promises can be fulfilled. To engender public trust, many entities in the ADS
community participate in standards development organizations (SDOs) with the
goal of enhancing safety for the entire industry through a collaborative
approach. The breadth and depth of the ADS safety standardization landscape is
vast and constantly changing, as often is the case for novel technologies in
rapid evolution. The pace of development of the ADS industry makes it hard for
the public and interested parties to keep track of ongoing SDO efforts,
including the topics touched by each standard and the committees addressing
each topic, as well as make sense of the wealth of documentation produced.
Therefore, the authors present here a simplified framework for abstracting and
organizing the current landscape of ADS safety standards into high-level, long
term themes. This framework is then utilized to develop and organize associated
research questions that have not yet reached widely adopted industry positions,
along with identifying potential gaps where further research and
standardization is needed.
