Intent Communication between Autonomous Vehicles and Pedestrians

Abstract

When pedestrians encounter vehicles, they typically stop and wait for a signal from the driver to either cross or wait. What happens when the car is autonomous and there isn't a human driver to signal them? This paper seeks to address this issue with an intent communication system (ICS) that acts in place of a human driver. This intent system has been developed to take into account the psychology behind what pedestrians are familiar with and what they expect from machines. The system integrates those expectations into the design of physical systems and mathematical algorithms. The goal of the system is to ensure that communication is simple, yet effective without leaving pedestrians with a sense of distrust in autonomous vehicles. To validate the ICS, two types of experiments have been run: field tests with an autonomous vehicle to determine how humans actually interact with the ICS and simulations to account for multiple potential behaviors.The results from both experiments show that humans react positively and more predictably when the intent of the vehicle is communicated compared to when the intent of the vehicle is unknown. In particular, the results from the simulation specifically showed a 142 percent difference between the pedestrian's trust in the vehicle's actions when the ICS is enabled and the pedestrian has prior knowledge of the vehicle than when the ICS is not enabled and the pedestrian having no prior knowledge of the vehicle.

The Adaptability and Challenges of Autonomous Vehicles to Pedestrians in Urban China

“…Purple lights moving from right to the left meat the vehicle would start soon. Milecia et al proposed a method fusing the speaker, LED word displays as well as strobe lights to transfer intent and corresponding experiments showed pedestriansâĂŹ trust to AVs was greatly improved (Matthews et al, 2017). Furthermore, based on human-robot interaction, three novel methods were proposed by Nicole et al (Mirnig et al, 2017).…”

Expressing Robot Incapability

“…Communicating intent is useful: legible motion improves joint human-robot task performance [9] and in fact arises naturally from optimizing for joint performance [28]. Beyond motion, prior work has explored communicating intent through visualizing planned trajectories (e.g., via targeted lighting [2] or augmented reality [5,26]), gaze [21], body language [3], human-like gestures [12,13], verbal communication [25], and LED displays [19]. Why/Cause of Incapability.…”

Autonomous Vehicles that Interact with Pedestrians: A Survey of Theory and Practice

“…Matthews et al [97] measure the importance of using an intent display in communication with pedestrians. The authors used a remotely controlled golf cart with and without an intent display mechanism.…”

“…The group of participants who were familiarized with the communication technology prior to the experiment exhibited more trust in the vehicle. Although intent displays have been shown to improve the overall experience of pedestrians during interaction [97], [98], they don't always seem to be very effective. In her studies, Yang [96] used a display to show "Safe to Cross" message to pedestrians.…”

“…The use of displays is a common technique to transmit a message [110], [98], [101]. Such displays can either transmit informative messages, for instance, the speed of the vehicle [99] or intention of the vehicle [97], or they can be advisory, meaning that they suggest a course of action to pedestrians, e.g. a sign indicating cross/not to cross [99], [8] (see Fig.…”