How Do We Study Pedestrian Interaction with Automated Vehicles? Preliminary Findings from the European interACT Project

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of a set of behavioural studies, conducted as part of the European project interACT, to understand road user behaviour in current urban settings. The paper reports on a number of methodologies used to understand how humans currently interact in urban traffic, in order to establish what information would be useful for the design of future AVs, when interacting with other road users, especially pedestrians. In addition to summarising the results from a number of observation studies, we report on preliminary results from Virtual Reality studies, investigating if, in the absence of a human vehicle controller, externally presented interfaces can be used for communication between AVs and pedestrians. Finally, an overview of the mathematical and computational modelling techniques used to understand how AV and pedestrian behaviour can be both cooperative, and effective is provided. The hope is that future AVs can be designed with an understanding of how humans cooperate and communicate in mixed traffic, promoting good traffic flow, user acceptance and user trust.

I, AV: A Ghost Driver Field Study Exploring the Application of Anthropomorphism in AV-Pedestrian Communication

“…A number of different external human-machine interface (e-HMI) concepts have thus been proposed, utilising various modalities and levels of complexity [6,7]. However, although there is work underway to develop an international standard in this area 1 , there is currently no consensus on an ideal solution. The majority of existing eHMI design concepts utilise visual modalities (e.g., text, light or colour) to communicate with pedestrians, although auditory and haptic interfaces have also been posited.…”

“…), and occasional verbal, cues, that are traditionally exchanged between a driver and a pedestrian, will be absent. These traditionally aim to establish a mutual understanding of perception (I have seen you), approach intent (I am giving way) and leave intent (I am about to set off again) [1]. Whilst it is recognised that in many situations the dominant cues processed by a pedestrian are the vehicle's approach speed and deceleration profile (so-called implicit cues; [2]), it is also acknowledged that pedestrian-driver social negotiations (explicit cues) are important to overall traffic safety, especially in low-speed crossing scenarios in complex urban settings [3].…”

Expert Drivers’ Prospective Thinking-Aloud to Enhance Automated Driving Technologies – Investigating Uncertainty and Anticipation in Traffic

“…However, in cognitive mimetics it is essential to pay attention also to the contents of experts' information processes (i.e., mental contents) (Newell and Simon, 1972). Recently, researchers in the field have started to realize the importance of examining human road users' behavior and its modeling in order to develop better automated driving technologies (e.g., Domeyer et al, 2019;Markkula et al, 2020Markkula et al, , 2018Merat et al, 2019). Due to the importance of anticipation of traffic events for successful driving (Stahl et al, 2013), the goal for investigating expert drivers' behavior here is to get a clearer idea of the information contents relevant in anticipatory driving.…”

An enhanced vehicle control model for assessing highly automated driving safety

“…other vehicles, roadside infrastructure, the Cloud) and help the analyst to consider how errors in that information might influence vehicle safety. Additionally, the model needs to consider other road users in the context of the ego vehicle's safety, and potentially the influence that the ego vehicle's behaviour might have on other road users [17].…”