Joint Attention in Driver-Pedestrian Interaction: from Theory to Practice
It tackles the challenge of enabling autonomous vehicles to communicate effectively in urban environments to resolve traffic ambiguities, but is incremental as it reviews existing theories and methods.
This literature review addresses the interaction problem between pedestrians and drivers/vehicles from a joint attention perspective, discussing its theoretical background, application to traffic interaction, and practical implementation approaches for autonomous vehicles.
Today, one of the major challenges that autonomous vehicles are facing is the ability to drive in urban environments. Such a task requires communication between autonomous vehicles and other road users in order to resolve various traffic ambiguities. The interaction between road users is a form of negotiation in which the parties involved have to share their attention regarding a common objective or a goal (e.g. crossing an intersection), and coordinate their actions in order to accomplish it. In this literature review we aim to address the interaction problem between pedestrians and drivers (or vehicles) from joint attention point of view. More specifically, we will discuss the theoretical background behind joint attention, its application to traffic interaction and practical approaches to implementing joint attention for autonomous vehicles.