Abstract
In the United States, pedestrians aged ≤14 suffer the highest percentage of motor vehicle collisions leading to injuries and fatalities. In part to reduce motor-vehicle related crashes, transportation researchers are pursuing the implementation of automated vehicles. Vehicle automation will eventually remove human control from the vehicle, but this may also remove interpersonal communication between pedestrians and human drivers. Therefore, many studies have investigated pedestrians’ choice of features on autonomous vehicles (AVs) to facilitate communication of vehicle intention. The inclusion of child populations in these studies has been rare, however. This study investigated pedestrians’ understandability of the external features on autonomous vehicles, considering different vehicle sizes and physics (speed and distance), and included both children and adults. The results revealed that children relied entirely on the communicating features of AVs to make their judgement on their safety, thereby adopted a higher risk strategy than their adult counterparts.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Deb, S., Strawderman, L., Carruth, D.W., DuBien, J., Smith, B., Garrison, T.M.: Development and validation of a questionnaire to assess pedestrian receptivity toward fully autonomous vehicles. Transp. Res. Part C Emerg. Technol. 84, 178–195 (2017)
Guéguen, N., Meineri, S., Eyssartier, C.: A pedestrian’s stare and drivers’ stopping behavior: a field experiment at the pedestrian crossing. Saf. Sci. 75, 87–89 (2015)
Ren, Z., Jiang, X., Wang, W.: Analysis of the influence of pedestrians’ eye contact on drivers’ comfort boundary during the crossing conflict. Procedia Eng. 137, 399–406 (2016)
Šucha, M.: Road users’ strategies and communication: driver-pedestrian interaction. In: Transport Research Arena (TRA) 2014 Proceedings (2014)
Anthony, S.: The trollable self-driving car. https://slate.com/technology/2016/03/google-self-driving-cars-lack-a-humans-intuition-for-what-other-drivers-will-do.html
Richtel, M., Dougherty, C.: Google’s driverless cars run into problem: cars with drivers. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/technology/personaltech/google-says-its-not-the-driverless-cars-fault-its-other-drivers.html
Deb, S., Warner, B., Poudel, S., Bhandari, S.: Identification of external design preferences in autonomous vehicles. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference, pp. 44–69 (2016)
Deb, S., Strawderman, L.J., Carruth, D.W.: Investigating pedestrian suggestions for external features on fully autonomous vehicles: a virtual reality experiment. Transp. Res. Part F Traffic Psychol. Behav. 59, 135–149 (2018)
Clamann, M., Aubert, M., Cummings, M.L.: Evaluation of vehicle-to-pedestrian communication displays for autonomous vehicles (2017)
Matthews, M., Chowdhary, G., Kieson, E.: Intent communication between autonomous vehicles and pedestrians (2017)
Lagstrom, T., Lundgren, M.V.: AVIP-autonomous vehicles interaction with pedestrians (2015). http://www.tekniskdesign.se/download/AVIP_MasterThesis_Lagstrom_MalmstenLundgren.pdf
Zhang, S., Klein, D.A., Bauckhage, C., Cremers, A.B.: Fast moving pedestrian detection based on motion segmentation and new motion features. Multimed. Tools Appl. 75, 6263–6282 (2016)
Mahadevan, K., Somanath, S., Sharlin, E.: Communicating awareness and intent in autonomous vehicle-pedestrian interaction. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI 2018, pp. 1–12 (2018)
Fridman, L., Mehler, B., Xia, L., Yang, Y., Facusse, L.Y., Reimer, B.: To walk or not to walk: crowdsourced assessment of external vehicle-to-pedestrian displays. arXiv.org (2017)
Florentine, E., Ang, M.A., Pendleton, S.D., Andersen, H., Ang, M.H.: Pedestrian notification methods in autonomous vehicles for multi-class mobility-on-demand service. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Human Agent Interaction - HAI 2016, pp. 387–392 (2016)
Siripanich, S.: Crossing the road in the world of autonomous cars. https://medium.com/teague-labs/crossing-the-road-in-the-world-of-autonomous-cars-e14827bfa301
Charisi, V., Habibovic, A., Andersson, J., Li, J., Evers, V.: Children’s views on identification and intention communication of self-driving vehicles. In: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children - IDC 2017, pp. 399–404 (2017)
Habibovic, A., Lundgren, V.M., Andersson, J., Klingegård, M., Lagström, T., Sirkka, A., Fagerlönn, J., Edgren, C., Fredriksson, R., Krupenia, S., Saluäär, D., Larsson, P.: Communicating intent of automated vehicles to pedestrians. Front. Psychol. 9, 1336 (2018)
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation: Mitsubishi Electric Introduces Road-illuminating Directional Indicators. http://www.mitsubishielectric.com/news/2015/1023.html
Chang, C.-M., Toda, K., Sakamoto, D., Igarashi, T.: Eyes on a car: an interface design for communication between an autonomous car and a pedestrian. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications - AutomotiveUI 2017, pp. 65–73 (2017)
National Center for Statistics and Analysis: Pedestrians: 2016 data (Traffic Safety Facts. Report No. DOT HS 812 493), National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Washington, D.C. (2018)
Druin, A.: The role of children in the design of new technology. Behav. Inf. Technol. 21, 1–25 (2002)
National Center for Statistics and Analysis: Pedestrians: 2015 data (Traffic Safety Facts. Report No. DOT HS 812 375), National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Washington, D.C. (2017)
Kennedy, R.S., Lane, N.E., Berbaum, K.S., Lilienthal, M.G.: Simulator sickness questionnaire: an enhanced method for quantifying simulator sickness. Int. J. Aviat. Psychol. 3, 203–220 (1993)
Congiu, M., Whelan, M., Oxley, J., D’Elia, A., Charlton, J.: Crossing roads safely: an experimental study of age and gender differences in gap selection by child pedestrians. In: Proceedings of the Australasian Road Safety Research, Policing and Education Conference (2006)
Connelly, M.L., Conaglen, H.M., Parsonson, B.S., Isler, R.B.: Child pedestrians’ crossing gap thresholds. Accid. Anal. Prev. 30, 443–453 (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Deb, S., Carruth, D.W., Fuad, M., Stanley, L.M., Frey, D. (2020). Comparison of Child and Adult Pedestrian Perspectives of External Features on Autonomous Vehicles Using Virtual Reality Experiment. In: Stanton, N. (eds) Advances in Human Factors of Transportation. AHFE 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 964. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20503-4_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20503-4_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-20502-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-20503-4
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)