Communicating Intent of Automated Vehicles to Pedestrians

By Azra Habibovic, V. Lundgren, Jonas Andersson, M. Klingegård, Tobias Lagström, Anna Sirkka, Johan Fagerlönn, Claes Edgren, R. Fredriksson, S. Krupenia and 2 more. Frontiers in Psychology, 2018

301 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While traffic signals, signs, and road markings provide explicit guidelines for those operating in and around the roadways, some decisions, such as determinations of “who will go first,” are made by implicit negotiations between road users. In such situations, pedestrians are today often dependent on cues in drivers’ behavior such as eye contact, postures, and gestures. With the introduction of more automated functions and the transfer of control from the driver to the vehicle, pedestrians cannot rely on such non-verbal cues anymore. To study how the interaction between pedestrians and automated vehicles (AVs) might look like in the future, and how this might be affected if AVs were to communicate their intent to pedestrians, we designed an external vehicle interface called automated vehicle interaction principle (AVIP) that communicates vehicles’ mode and intent to pedestrians. The interaction was explored in two experiments using a Wizard of Oz approach to simulate automated driving. The first experiment was carried out at a zebra crossing and involved nine pedestrians. While it focused mainly on assessing the usability of the interface, it also revealed initial indications related to pedestrians’ emotions and perceived safety when encountering an AV with/without the interface. The second experiment was carried out in a parking lot and involved 24 pedestrians, which enabled a more detailed assessment of pedestrians’ perceived safety when encountering an AV, both with and without the interface. For comparison purposes, these pedestrians also encountered a conventional vehicle. After a short training course, the interface was deemed easy for the pedestrians to interpret. The pedestrians stated that they felt significantly less safe when they encountered the AV without the interface, compared to the conventional vehicle and the AV with the interface. This suggests that the interface could contribute to a positive experience and improved perceived safety in pedestrian encounters with AVs – something that might be important for general acceptance of AVs. As such, this topic should be further investigated in future studies involving a larger sample and more dynamic conditions.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b0a0acd6de742dc3f11efb120befae91943ae1a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Automotive Engineering

1. John K. Tsotsos
2. Amir Rasouli
3. J. D. de Winter
4. Riender Happee

In Social Psychology

1. J. D. de Winter
2. Riender Happee
3. John K. Tsotsos
4. Amir Rasouli
5. Miltos Kyriakidis

Citations in the corpus

• Autonomous Vehicles That Interact With Pedestrians: A Survey of Theory and Practice (2018, background): “What makes defining a unified framework for an interactive autonomous vehicle difficult is the subjective nature of the problem [155].”
• External Human-Machine Interfaces on Automated Vehicles: Effects on Pedestrian Crossing Decisions (2019, methodology): “This concept resembles various other concepts in the literature, which used an LED strip at the front of the car (Habibovic, 2018; Lagström & Lundgren, 2015; Mahadevan, Somanath, & Sharlin, 2018).”