Engineers and scientists engaged in making artificially intelligent systems have successfully resolved many challenging technical problems and have demonstrated the practical viability of autonomous driving on test tracks and carefully selected roads. These are major milestones in engineering and a clear harbinger of a transformative new era of moving goods, supplies, and people from point A to point B. Yet, along with these accomplishments come many new challenges that are not only of a technical nature, but also of a broader social, legal, and even “ethical” nature. Such issues become more urgent and important as collisions and accidents involving self-driving or semi-autonomous vehicles occur more often – injuring and even killing humans in the real world. A key challenge that needs to be addressed is making sure that artificially engineered automobiles and humans cohabit in a harmonious, safe, and secure manner. For researchers, this provides the exciting opportunity to pursue important problems from a broad range of topics in distributed perception, cognition, planning, and control. We will present a “Human-Centered” approach to the development of highly automated vehicle technologies. We will also present a brief sampling of contributions in the development of systems and algorithms to perceive situational criticalities, predict intentions of intelligent agents, and plan/execute actions for safe & smooth maneuvers and control transitions. We will highlight major research milestones in the area of the autonomous vehicle and discuss issues that require deeper, critical examination and careful resolution to assure the safe, reliable, and robust operation of these highly complex systems in the real world. Speaker(s): MOHAN, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/320885