Creating Impactful Autonomous Driving Datasets: A Strategic Guide from Research Gap to Benchmark

Well-designed autonomous driving datasets have fundamentally shaped research progress, yet existing literature primarily describes what datasets contain rather than how to strategically design impactful ones. This is especially limiting for small and medium-sized labs and startups that cannot afford to misallocate scarce resources. We argue that impactful dataset creation begins with a diagnosis: whether a research question is blocked by a data problem or an evaluation problem, and proceeds by selecting the minimal data operator(s) that closes the resulting gap, recording new data only when no cheaper operator(s) suffices. We analyze the evolution of major autonomous driving (AD) datasets through this lens and distill a strategic framework spanning gap identification, operator choice, sensor suite design, and annotation strategy. We ground the framework in a running case study of our KITScenes dataset family. The datasets are available at: https://kitscenes.com/