Azra Habibovic

Will There Be New Communication Needs When Introducing Automated Vehicles to the Urban Context

In today’s encounters with vehicles, pedestrians are often dependent on cues in drivers’ behavior such as eye contact, postures, and gestures. With an increased level of automation, and the transfer of control from the driver to the vehicle, the pedestrians cannot rely on such cues anymore. The question is: will there be new communication needs to warrant safe interactions with automated vehicles? This question is addressed by exploring pedestrians’ willingness to cross the street and their emotional state in encounters with a seemingly automated vehicle. The results show that pedestrians’ willingness to cross the street decrease with an inattentive driver. Eye contact with the driver on the other hand leads to calm interaction between vehicle and pedestrian. In conclusion, to sustain perceived safety when eye contact is discarded due to vehicle automation, it could be beneficial to provide pedestrians with the corresponding information in some other way (e.g., by means of an external vehicle interface).

Evaluating interactions with non-existing automated vehicles: three Wizard of Oz approaches

Highly automated test vehicles are rare today, and (independent) researchers have often limited access to them. Also, developing fully functioning system prototypes is time and effort consuming. In this paper, we present three adaptions of the Wizard of Oz technique as a means of gathering data about interactions with highly automated vehicles in early development phases. Two of them address interactions between drivers and highly automated vehicles, while the third one is adapted to address interactions between pedestrians and highly automated vehicles. The focus is on the experimental methodology adaptations and our lessons learned.

Reducing Conflict Between Vulnerable Road Users and Automated Vehicles

This chapter presents a summary of AVS 2016 Breakout Session 14, Reducing Conflict Between Vulnerable Road Users and Automated Vehicles. The session was scheduled to run for 90 min with approximately 60 min devoted to a panel of four speakers and 30 min of general discussion. The four speakers presented on a range of issues related to the intersection of VRUs and AVs. Key points included the need to develop usable, cross-cultural methods for pedestrians and AVs to communicate, the need to identify areas of opportunity and challenge relative to the current state of driver/VRU interactions, the need for further development and human factors testing of pedestrian-enabled mobile technology, and the importance of ongoing field testing.

Command-Based Driving for Tactical Control of Highly Automated Vehicles

As vehicles become highly automated, their drivers become more passive. A concern is it may take drivers out of the control loop, causing reduced satisfaction and perceived control. The study explores whether or not drivers feel the need to control tactical decisions when operating highly automated vehicles. An experiment involving 17 drivers was carried out in a driving simulator. Each driver tested two different tactical controllers, allowing him/her to give various tactical commands to the vehicle (e.g., overtake, park). The results indicate that the drivers experienced a need to affect tactical decisions of highly automated vehicles. Several of the tactical commands were found useful, especially on rural roads and highways. It also gave them a feeling of being in control of the vehicle, suggesting that command-based driving might be a way to keep drivers in the control loop.

External Vehicle Interfaces for Communication with Other Road Users

How to ensure trust and societal acceptance of automated vehicles (AVs) is a widely-discussed topic today. While trust and acceptance could be influenced by a range of factors, one thing is sure: the ability of AVs to safely and smoothly interact with other road users will play a key role. Based on our experiences from a series of studies, this paper elaborates on issues that AVs may face in interactions with other road users and whether external vehicle interfaces could support these interactions. Our overall conclusion is that such interfaces may be beneficial in situations where negotiation is needed. However, these benefits, and potential drawbacks, need to be further explored to create a common language, or standard, for how AVs should communicate with other road users.

Workshop on Methodology: Evaluating Interactions between Automated Vehicles and Other Road Users---What Works in Practice?

Methods and metrics for studying interactions between automated vehicles and other road users in their vicinity, such as pedestrians, cyclists and non-automated vehicles, are not established yet. This workshop focuses on identifying the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies that could potentially be used to study such interactions. The objective lies in determining the proper experimental design, sensitivity of metrics for measuring user behavior, ecological validity, generalizability of findings, extraction of insights regarding how findings can be translated into actionable requirements, and the alternatives for conducting longitudinal field studies. It will be of an interactive nature and involve hands-on activities. The workshop will consolidate existing knowledge, identify recurring issues, and explore the path towards resolving these issues. The outcome will be compiled into a paper to share this valuable knowledge with a broader research community.

Communicating Intent of Automated Vehicles to Pedestrians

While traffic signals, signs, and road markings provide explicit guidelines for those operating in and around the roadways, some decisions, such as determinations of “who will go first,” are made by implicit negotiations between road users. In such situations, pedestrians are today often dependent on cues in drivers’ behavior such as eye contact, postures, and gestures. With the introduction of more automated functions and the transfer of control from the driver to the vehicle, pedestrians cannot rely on such non-verbal cues anymore. To study how the interaction between pedestrians and automated vehicles (AVs) might look like in the future, and how this might be affected if AVs were to communicate their intent to pedestrians, we designed an external vehicle interface called automated vehicle interaction principle (AVIP) that communicates vehicles’ mode and intent to pedestrians. The interaction was explored in two experiments using a Wizard of Oz approach to simulate automated driving. The first experiment was carried out at a zebra crossing and involved nine pedestrians. While it focused mainly on assessing the usability of the interface, it also revealed initial indications related to pedestrians’ emotions and perceived safety when encountering an AV with/without the interface. The second experiment was carried out in a parking lot and involved 24 pedestrians, which enabled a more detailed assessment of pedestrians’ perceived safety when encountering an AV, both with and without the interface. For comparison purposes, these pedestrians also encountered a conventional vehicle. After a short training course, the interface was deemed easy for the pedestrians to interpret. The pedestrians stated that they felt significantly less safe when they encountered the AV without the interface, compared to the conventional vehicle and the AV with the interface. This suggests that the interface could contribute to a positive experience and improved perceived safety in pedestrian encounters with AVs – something that might be important for general acceptance of AVs. As such, this topic should be further investigated in future studies involving a larger sample and more dynamic conditions.

A Head-Mounted Display to Support Teleoperations of Shared Automated Vehicles

Automated driving systems will be severely challenged in the unpredictable conditions of mixed traffic. Consequently, some form of human support remains essential in the foreseeable future. This challenge is especially true for Shared Automated Vehicles (SAVs), as these vehicles will likely not include any human driver on-board. When an SAV will encounter a scenario it cannot handle, a remote human operator will need to intervene and help the vehicle and its passengers. In this study a user-centred design approach is used to study whether a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) interface can support such operators and provide them with additional spatial awareness. Two prototypes (an HMD and a computer display) are developed and evaluated using pre-recorded real-world scenarios. Twelve participants assessed three possible scenarios a remote operator may encounter. Among participants, the study found evidence of strong implicit spatial awareness when using an HMD interface.

Coordinating dangerous goods vehicles: C-ITS applications for safe road tunnels

Despite the existing regulation efforts and measures, vehicles with dangerous goods still pose significant risks on public safety, especially in road tunnels. Solutions based on cooperative intelligent transportation system (C-ITS) are promising measures, however, they have received limited attention. We propose C-ITS applications that coordinate dangerous goods vehicles to minimize the risk by maintaining safe distances between them in road tunnels. Different mechanisms, including global centralized coordination, global distributed coordination, and local coordination, are proposed and investigated. A preliminary simulation is performed and demonstrates their effectiveness.