To Walk or Not to Walk: Crowdsourced Assessment of External Vehicle-to-Pedestrian Displays
This addresses the need for efficient early-stage design evaluation in vehicle automation for researchers and designers, though it is incremental as it applies existing crowdsourcing methods to a new domain.
The study tackled the problem of assessing external vehicle-to-pedestrian display concepts for automated vehicles by implementing an online crowdsourced methodology using Amazon Mechanical Turk with 200 participants, resulting in a scalable approach that allows rapid evaluation of multiple designs in hours.
Researchers, technology reviewers, and governmental agencies have expressed concern that automation may necessitate the introduction of added displays to indicate vehicle intent in vehicle-to-pedestrian interactions. An automated online methodology for obtaining communication intent perceptions for 30 external vehicle-to-pedestrian display concepts was implemented and tested using Amazon Mechanic Turk. Data from 200 qualified participants was quickly obtained and processed. In addition to producing a useful early-stage evaluation of these specific design concepts, the test demonstrated that the methodology is scalable so that a large number of design elements or minor variations can be assessed through a series of runs even on much larger samples in a matter of hours. Using this approach, designers should be able to refine concepts both more quickly and in more depth than available development resources typically allow. Some concerns and questions about common assumptions related to the implementation of vehicle-to-pedestrian displays are posed.