With autonomous vehicles already rolling on public roads, researchers from the University of Nottingham in the UK have used a camouflaged driver to look at how pedestrians react to visual cues from oncoming cars without a human at the wheel.
Folks trying to cross the road as the group’s Nissan Leaf test car approaches may be forgiven for believing that it was a fully autonomous vehicle, as the human driver wore clothing designed to look like a car seat, including full head gear resembling a headrest, while enabling the driver to control the vehicle.
The idea behind the study was to determine public trust in autonomous vehicles, and investigate the use of different External Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMI) for communicating the car’s intentions or driving behavior to pedestrians.
The team tried out three types of visual displays via an addressable RGB LED matrix to the front of the hood and a LED strip atop the windshield.
The first design employed the LED strip to mimic “the papillary response of an eye: lateral movement demonstrated scanning/awareness, and blinking provided an implicit cue of the vehicle’s intention to give way.” A second design made use of a face and eyes on the matrix display accompanied by “humanlike language” text prompts as the car approached a pedestrian (such as “I have seen you” or “I am giving way”), while a third produced a vehicle icon and used “vehicle-centric language” to try and get the message across.
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