Today, a simple head nod or hand wave from a driver is usually enough to indicate it’s okay for a pedestrian to cross the street, but in an autonomous vehicle future, how will a self-driving car with no human driver communicate with pedestrians, cyclists, or humans operating other cars on the road?
Looking to prepare for this eventual reality, Ford Motor Company partnered with Virginia Tech Transportation Institute to conduct a user experience study and test out a method for communicating a vehicle’s intent by soliciting real-world reactions to a self-driving car on public roads.
As part of Ford’s efforts to ensure autonomous vehicles can safely share the road with humans, the joint research project set out to investigate the most effective means for the vehicle to communicate. The team considered using displayed text, but that would require people to all understand the same language. The use of symbols was rejected because symbols historically have low recognition among consumers.
In the end, the researchers decided lighting signals are the most effective means for creating a visual communications protocol for self-driving vehicles. As light signals for turning and braking indication are already standardised and widely understood, they determined the use of lighting signals is best to communicate whether the vehicle is in autonomous drive mode, beginning to yield, or about to accelerate from a stop.
So, Ford outfitted a Transit Connect van with a light bar placed on the windshield. To simulate a fully self-driving experience without using an actual autonomous vehicle, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute team developed a way to conceal the driver with a “seat suit.”
The suit creates the illusion of a fully autonomous vehicle, which is necessary to test and evaluate real-world encounters and behaviours. The researchers then went to work experimenting with three light signals to test the communication of the vehicle’s intent.
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