Designing a Pedestrian Simulator for Autonomous Vehicles in Mixed Traffic

As autonomous vehicles are introduced to our roads, they will co-exist with vehicles of varying levels of autonomy, including those that are manually-driven or semi-autonomous. While manually-driven vehicles can communicate with pedestrians through cues such as eye contact and hand gestures, semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles will not. To study this future interaction, we designed a pedestrian simulator in virtual reality (VR). We immersed participants in VR to evaluate how they could make safe crossing decisions when faced with vehicles of varying autonomy level. Our findings highlight the role interfaces play in communicating awareness and intent, across vehicles of all autonomy levels, and demonstrate the usefulness of immersive pedestrian simulators in designing autonomous vehicle interfaces.

Mahadevan, K., Sanoubari, E., Somanath, S., Young, J. E., & Sharlin, E. (2019, June). AV-Pedestrian Interaction Design Using a Pedestrian Mixed Traffic Simulator. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 475-486). ACM.

Find the paper at: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3322328 

Pedestrian Simulator
Friday, October 19, 2018 - 10:45pm