Designing for Projection-based Communication between Autonomous Vehicles and Pedestrians

TL;DR

The design and evaluation of in-situ projections on the road of an autonomous vehicle's intent and awareness to pedestrians is presented and a series of design recommendations for projection-based communication between AVs and pedestrians are presented.

Abstract

Recent studies have investigated new approaches for communicating an autonomous vehicle's (AV) intent and awareness to pedestrians. This paper adds to this body of work by presenting the design and evaluation of in-situ projections on the road. Our design combines common traffic light patterns with aesthetic visual elements. We describe the iterative design process and the prototyping methods used in each stage. The final design concept was represented as a virtual reality simulation and evaluated with 18 participants in four different street crossing scenarios, which included three scenarios that simulated various degrees of system errors. We found that different design elements were able to support participants' confidence in their decision even when the AV failed to correctly detect their presence. We also identified elements in our design that needed to be more clearly communicated. Based on these findings, the paper presents a series of design recommendations for projection-based communication between AVs and pedestrians.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: (Left) Japanese Zen garden with gravel that mimics wave pattern, creating a calm feeling. Image credit: PlusMinus via Wikimedia. (Right) A traffic colour scheme was used in our design solution to take advantage of existing traffic communication practices. Image credit: Harshal Desai on Unsplash.
• Figure 2: The four key visualisations signifying the intent and awareness of the AV in an ideal scenario (left), and the four scenarios used in the VR study, including the ideal scenario (A) and three scenarios with varied degrees of sensor failures (B, C, D) (right).
• Figure 3: The scenario set-up in VR: The car starts its trajectory at the corner of the street and approaches the pedestrian from the right side.
• Figure 4: The study environment and setup, including the (a) interview booth; (b) control computer; (c) VR space; and (d) virtual space.