ABSTRACT
The accelerating deployment of autonomous technologies across multiple transportation sectors, that is, maritime autonomous surface ships (MASS), unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV), has given rise to an urgent need to understand and secure these systems against cyber threats. This chapter presents a comparative bibliometric analysis of the cybersecurity research landscape across these three domains. The aim is to review the cross-sectoral patterns, research frontiers and structural gaps. Results reveal a highly uneven maturity gradient, with cybersecurity research on CAV dominating both in volume and interdisciplinarity, followed by UAS, while MASS exhibits a fragmented research structure. The results also show that while autonomous systems research shares foundational cybersecurity challenges, to prevent this, the MASS, UAS and CAV industries might benefit from a shared reporting system or database in which known vulnerabilities, threats, or attacks are alerted about when discovered so that pre-emptive action can be taken. Nevertheless, this may be applicable to some extent, and the epistemic and disciplinary silos across sectors hinder convergence and reuse of solutions. Addressing this fragmentation requires structured cross-industry collaboration, harmonised threat taxonomies and joint development of interoperable security frameworks. This study contributes a multi-industry bibliometric baseline for future interdisciplinary research and policy in cyber-secure autonomy.
