How Do We Study Pedestrian Interaction with Automated Vehicles? Preliminary Findings from the European interACT Project

This paper provides an overview of a set of behavioural studies, conducted as part of the European project interACT, to understand road user behaviour in current urban settings. The paper reports on a number of methodologies used to understand how humans currently interact in urban traffic, in order to establish what information would be useful for the design of future AVs, when interacting with other road users, especially pedestrians. In addition to summarising the results from a number of observation studies, we report on preliminary results from Virtual Reality studies, investigating if, in the absence of a human vehicle controller, externally presented interfaces can be used for communication between AVs and pedestrians. Finally, an overview of the mathematical and computational modelling techniques used to understand how AV and pedestrian behaviour can be both cooperative, and effective is provided. The hope is that future AVs can be designed with an understanding of how humans cooperate and communicate in mixed traffic, promoting good traffic flow, user acceptance and user trust.