Response of Vulnerable Road Users to Visual Information from Autonomous Vehicles in Shared Spaces
This addresses safety and trust concerns for pedestrians and cyclists interacting with autonomous vehicles in shared urban environments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing interaction paradigms.
The study investigated whether visual communication cues from autonomous vehicles are needed for safe interaction with vulnerable road users in shared spaces, finding that such cues are not necessarily required under informal traffic rules.
Completely unmanned autonomous vehicles have been anticipated for a while. Initially, these are expected to drive only under certain conditions on some roads, and advanced functionality is required to cope with the ever-increasing challenges of safety. To enhance the public's perception of road safety and trust in new vehicular technologies, we investigate in this paper the effect of several interaction paradigms with vulnerable road users by developing and applying algorithms for the automatic analysis of pedestrian body language. We assess behavioral patterns and determine the impact of the coexistence of AVs and other road users on general road safety in a shared space for VRUs and vehicles. Results showed that the implementation of visual communication cues for interacting with VRUs is not necessarily required for a shared space in which informal traffic rules apply.