Jose Gonzalez-Belmonte

Jose Gonzalez-Belmonte, Jaerock Kwon

As we move towards a future of autonomous vehicles, questions regarding their method of communication have arisen. One of the common questions concerns the placement of the signaling used to communicate with pedestrians and road users, but few works have been fully dedicated to the matter. This paper uses a simulation made in the Unity game engine to record the fifteen different vehicles under fifty-seven different scenarios each for the first time, in order to find how often its forward-facing exterior surfaces can be seen by a pedestrian on the sidewalk. Variables include the vehicle type, position, number of vehicles on the road, camera position and direction, as well as its minimum and maximum distance from the recorded points. It was concluded that the areas of the vehicle most often seen by pedestrians on the sidewalk attempting to cross the road were the wheels, front fenders, and headlights. Based on these results, a suggestion is made to implement displays on at least two of the following regions: windshield, front fenders, side mirrors. These findings are valuable in the future design of signaling for autonomous vehicles in order to ensure pedestrians are able to see them on approaching vehicles. The software used provides a platform for similar works in the future to be conducted.

Jose Gonzalez-Belmonte, Jaerock Kwon

As the number of fatalities involving Autonomous Vehicles increase, the need for a universal method of communicating between vehicles and other agents on the road has also increased. Over the past decade, numerous proposals of external Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) have been brought forward with the purpose of bridging this communication gap, with none yet to be determined as the ideal one. This work proposes a universal evaluation method conformed of 223 questions to objectively evaluate and compare different proposals and arrive at a conclusion. The questionnaire is divided into 7 categories that evaluate different aspects of any given proposal that uses eHMIs: ease of standardization, cost effectiveness, accessibility, ease of understanding, multifacetedness in communication, positioning, and readability. In order to test the method it was used on four existing proposals, plus a baseline using only kinematic motions, in order to both exemplify the application of the evaluation method and offer a baseline score for future comparison. The result of this testing suggests that the ideal method of machine-human communication is a combination of intentionally-designed vehicle kinematics and distributed well-placed text-based displays, but it also reveals knowledge gaps in the readability of eHMIs and the speed at which different observers may learn their meaning. This paper proposes future work related to these uncertainties, along with future testing with the proposed method.

Jaerock Kwon, Jose Gonzalez-Belmonte

One of the concerns with autonomous vehicles is their ability to communicate their intent to other road users, specially pedestrians, in order to prevent accidents. External Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) are the proposed solution to this issue, through the introduction of electronic devices on the exterior of a vehicle that communicate when the vehicle is planning on slowing down or yielding. This paper uses the technique of unwrapping the faces of a mesh onto a texture where every pixel is a unique color, as well as a series of animated simulations made and ran in the Unity game engine, to measure how many times is each point on a 2015 Ford F-150 King Ranch is unobstructed to a pedestrian attempting to cross the road at a four-way intersection. By cross-referencing the results with a color-coded map of the labeled parts on the exterior of the vehicle, it was concluded that while the bumper, grill, and hood were the parts of the vehicle visible to the crossing pedestrian most often, the existence of other vehicles on the same lane that might obstruct the view of these makes them insufficient. The study recommends instead a distributive approach to eHMIs by using both the windshield and frontal fenders as simultaneous placements for these devices.