skip to main content
10.1145/3319502.3374796acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageshriConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Defense Against the Dark Cars: Design Principles for Griefing of Autonomous Vehicles

Published: 09 March 2020 Publication History

Abstract

As autonomous vehicles (AVs) become a reality on public roads, researchers and designers are beginning to see unexpected reactions from the public ranging from curiosity to vandalism. These behaviors are concerning, as AV platforms will need to know how to deal with people behaving unexpectedly or aggressively. We call this griefing of AVs, adopting the term from harassment in online gaming. We discuss several examples of griefing observed in on-road field studies using a Wizard-of-Oz driverless car. While Uber and Waymo have anecdotally mentioned vandalism towards AVs, we believe this to be the first public video available of AV griefing ranging from playful to aggressive. To stimulate discussion, we propose speculative design principles to address griefing.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (fp1161vf.mp4)
Supplemental video
MP4 File (p201-moore.mp4)

References

[1]
2016. Americans Spend an Average of 17,600 Minutes Driving Each Year. Technical Report. AAA Foundation.
[2]
Christoph Bartneck. 2004. From Fiction to Science -- A Cultural Reflection of Social Robots. In Proceedings of the CHI2004 Workshop on Shaping Human-Robot Interaction.
[3]
Christoph Bartneck and Jun Hu. 2008. Exploring the Abuse of Robots. Interaction Studies 9, 3 (2008), 415--433. https://doi.org/10.1075/is.9.3.04bar
[4]
Jennings Brown. 2019. Will Self-Driving Cars Turn People Into Even Bigger Assholes? https://gizmodo.com/will-self-driving-cars-turn-people-into-evenbigger- ass-1835484015.
[5]
Drazen Brscic, Hiroyuki Kidokoro, Yoshitaka Suehiro, and Takayuki Kanda. 2015. Escaping from Children's Abuse of Social Robots. In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction - HRI '15. ACM Press, Portland, Oregon, USA, 59--66. https://doi.org/10.1145/2696454. 2696468
[6]
Thomas Chesney, Iain Coyne, Brian Logan, and Neil Madden. 2009. Griefing in Virtual Worlds: Causes, Casualties and Coping Strategies. Information Systems Journal 19, 6 (Nov. 2009), 525--548. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365--2575.2009. 00330.x
[7]
Jamie Condliffe. 2016. Humans Will Bully Mild-Mannered Autonomous Cars into Submissions on the Roads. MIT Technology Review (March 2016).
[8]
Steve Connor. 2016. First Self-Driving Cars Will Be Unmarked so That Other Drivers Don't Try to Bully Them. The Observer (Oct. 2016).
[9]
Rebecca Currano, So Yeon Park, Lawrence Domingo, Jesus Garcia-Mancilla, Pedro Santana-Mancilla, Victor Gonzalez, and Wendy Ju. 2018. Vamos! Observations of Pedestrian Interactions with Driverless Cars in Mexico. In 10th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI '18),. ACM, Toronto, Canada. https://doi.org/10.1145/3239060. 3241680
[10]
J. Christian Gerdes and Sarah M. Thornton. 2015. Implementable Ethics for Autonomous Vehicles. In Autonomes Fahren, Markus Maurer, J. Christian Gerdes, Barbara Lenz, and Hermann Winner (Eds.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 87--102. https://doi.org/10.1007/978--3--662--45854--9_5
[11]
Claire Hardaker. 2010. Trolling in Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication: From User Discussions to Academic Definitions. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture 6, 2 (Jan. 2010). https://doi.org/10.1515/ jplr.2010.011
[12]
Wendy Ju. 2015. The Design of Implicit Interactions. Synthesis Lectures on Human- Centered Informatics, Vol. 8. Morgan & Claypool. https://doi.org/10.2200/ S00619ED1V01Y201412HCI028
[13]
Joseph M Kayany. 1998. Contexts of Uninhibited Online Behavior: Flaming in Social Newsgroups on Usenet. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 49, 12 (1998), 1135--1141.
[14]
Catie Keck. 2019. Waymo's Autonomous Vehicles Are Reportedly Facing Ongoing Attacks in Arizona. https://gizmodo.com/waymos-autonomous-vehicles-arereportedly- facing-ongoin-1831417779.
[15]
Merel Keijsers and Christoph Bartneck. 2018. Mindless Robots Get Bullied. In HRI. Chicago, IL. https://doi.org/10.1145/3171221.3171266
[16]
Matthew John Lawrenson, Julian Charles Nolan, Norihiko Kobayashi, Nobuhiro Fukuda, and Keiji Nishihara. 2019. System and Method for Detecting Bullying of Autonomous Vehicles While Driving. US Patent Application No. US20190009785A1.
[17]
Jamy Li, Rebecca Currano, David Sirkin, David Goedicke, Hamish Tennent, Aaron Levine, Vanessa Evers, and Wendy Ju. 2020. On-Road and Online Studies to Investigate Beliefs and Behaviors of Netherlands and US Pedestrians Encountering Hidden-Driver Vehicles. In 15th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Cambridge, England.
[18]
Yuhua Liang and Seungcheol Austin Lee. 2017. Fear of Autonomous Robots and Artificial Intelligence: Evidence from National Representative Data with Probability Sampling. International Journal of Social Robotics 9, 3 (June 2017), 379--384. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-017-0401--3
[19]
Matt McFarland. 2017. Robots Hit the Streets -- and the Streets Hit Back. https://money.cnn.com/2017/04/28/technology/robot-bullying/.
[20]
Adam Millard-Ball. 2018. Pedestrians, Autonomous Vehicles, and Cities. Journal of Planning Education and Research 38, 1 (March 2018), 6--12. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0739456X16675674
[21]
Dylan Moore, Rebecca Currano, Michael Shanks, and David Sirkin. 2020. Defense Against the Dark Cars: How People Grief Autonomous Vehicles. In Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction - HRI '20. Cambridge, UK.
[22]
Dylan Moore, Rebecca Currano, G. Ella Strack, and David Sirkin. 2019. The Case for Implicit External Human-Machine Interfaces for Autonomous Vehicles. In AutoUI 2019. Utrecht, Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1145/3342197.3345320
[23]
Tatsuya Nomura, Takayuki Kanda, Hiroyoshi Kidokoro, Yoshitaka Suehiro, and Sachie Yamada. 2016. Why Do Children Abuse Robots? Interaction Studies 17, 3 (Dec. 2016), 347--369. https://doi.org/10.1075/is.17.3.02nom
[24]
Tatsuya Nomura, Takayuki Uratani, Kazutaka Matsumoto, Takayuki Kanda, Hiroyoshi Kidokoro, Yoshitaka Suehiro, and Sachie Yamada. 2015. Why Do Children Abuse Robots?. In HRI Extended Abstracts. Portland, OR. https: //doi.org/10.1145/2701973.2701977
[25]
Ryan Randazzo. 2018. A Slashed Tire, a Pointed Gun, Bullies on the Road: Why Do Waymo Self-Driving Vans Get so Much Hate? https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2018/12/11/waymoself- driving-vehicles-face-harassment-road-rage-phoenix-area/2198220002/.
[26]
Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass. 1996. The Media Equation. https://doi.org/ 10.1109/MSPEC.1997.576013 arXiv:1011.1669v3 Publication Title: The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places.
[27]
Samantha Reig, Aaron Steinfeld, Cecilia G Morales, and Jodi Forlizzi. 2018. A Field Study of Pedestrians and Autonomous Vehicles. In AutoUI. 198--209. https: //doi.org/10.1145/3239060.3239064
[28]
Michael Reilly. 2016. Outta My Way! How Will We Translate Google's Self- Driving Honks? MIT Technology Review (March 2016).
[29]
Dirk Rothenbücher, Jamy Li, David Sirkin, Brian Mok, andWendy Ju. 2016. Ghost Driver: A Field Study Investigating the Interaction between Pedestrians and Driverless Vehicles. In Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2016 25th IEEE International Symposium On. 795--802. https://doi.org/10.1109/ ROMAN.2016.7745210
[30]
P. Salvini, G. Ciaravella, W. Yu, G. Ferri, A. Manzi, B. Mazzolai, C. Laschi, S. R. Oh, and P. Dario. 2010. How Safe Are Service Robots in Urban Environments? Bullying a Robot. In 19th International Symposium in Robot and Human Interactive Communication. 1--7. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2010.5654677
[31]
Anna Schieben, Marc Wilbrink, Carmen Kettwich, Ruth Madigan, Tyron Louw, and Natasha Merat. 2018. Designing the Interaction of Automated Vehicles with Other Tra?c Participants: Design Considerations Based on Human Needs and Expectations. Cognition, Technology and Work (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10111-018-0521-z
[32]
David Sirkin, Brian Mok, Stephen Yang, andWendy Ju. 2015. Mechanical Ottoman: How Robotic Furniture Offers and Withdraws Support. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (2015), 11--18. https://doi.org/10.1145/2696454.2696461
[33]
David Harris Smith and Frauke Zeller. 2017. The Death and Lives of hitchBOT: The Design and Implementation of a Hitchhiking Robot. Leonardo 50, 1 (Feb. 2017), 77--78. https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_01354
[34]
Erik Sofge. 2015. The DARPA Robotics Challenge Was A Bust. https://www.popsci.com/darpa-robotics-challenge-was-bust-why-darpaneeds- try-again/.
[35]
Chris Tennant, Susan Howard, Bradley Franks, Martin Bauer, and Sally Stares. 2016. Autonomous Vehicles: Negotiating a Place on the Road. Technical Report. Lindon School of Economics and Political Science.
[36]
Daisuke Wakabayashi. 2018. Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Pedestrian in Arizona, Where Robots Roam. The New York Times (July 2018).
[37]
Dorothy EWarner and Mike Raiter. 2005. Social Context in Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs): Ethical Questions in Shared Space. International Review of Information Ethics 4 (2005), 7.
[38]
Paul Willis. 1981. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Columbia University Press, New York.
[39]
Su Yang. 2017. Driver Behavior Impact on Pedestrians' Crossing Experience in the Conditionally Autonomous Driving Context. Degree Project. KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
[40]
Stephen Yang, Brian Ka Jun Mok, David Sirkin, Hillary Page Ive, Rohan Maheshwari, Kerstin Fischer, and Wendy Ju. 2015. Experiences Developing Socially Acceptable Interactions for a Robotic Trash Barrel. In Proceedings - IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication. 277--284. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2015.7333693
[41]
Jakub Zlotowski, Kumar Yogeeswaran, and Christoph Bartneck. 2017. Can We Control It? Autonomous Robots Threaten Human Identity, Uniqueness, Safety, and Resources. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 100 (April 2017), 48--54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.12.008

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)On face value: a ghost driver field study investigating interactions between pedestrians and a driverless vehicle with anthropomorphic displaysErgonomics10.1080/00140139.2025.2454927(1-19)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Graph Convolution Network Combining Spatiotemporal Self-Attention and Mutual Information for Pedestrian-Trajectory PredictionTransportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board10.1177/03611981241270175Online publication date: 6-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Mapping Pedestrian-to-Driver Gestures: Implications for Autonomous Vehicle Bidirectional InteractionAdjunct Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications10.1145/3641308.3685014(1-7)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
March 2020
690 pages
ISBN:9781450367462
DOI:10.1145/3319502
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 March 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. autonomous vehicles
  2. bullying
  3. driverless cars
  4. ghostdriver
  5. griefing
  6. pedestrian interaction
  7. wizard-of-oz

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Funding Sources

Conference

HRI '20
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

HRI '25
ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
March 4 - 6, 2025
Melbourne , VIC , Australia

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)86
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)17
Reflects downloads up to 15 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)On face value: a ghost driver field study investigating interactions between pedestrians and a driverless vehicle with anthropomorphic displaysErgonomics10.1080/00140139.2025.2454927(1-19)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Graph Convolution Network Combining Spatiotemporal Self-Attention and Mutual Information for Pedestrian-Trajectory PredictionTransportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board10.1177/03611981241270175Online publication date: 6-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Mapping Pedestrian-to-Driver Gestures: Implications for Autonomous Vehicle Bidirectional InteractionAdjunct Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications10.1145/3641308.3685014(1-7)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2024
  • (2024)How do Automated Vehicles Influence Other Road Users and Sometimes Elicit Uncivil Behaviors?Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications10.1145/3640792.3675715(374-383)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Power in Human-Robot InteractionProceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/3610977.3634949(269-282)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Social interactions between automated vehicles and human drivers: a narrative reviewErgonomics10.1080/00140139.2024.2435038(1-20)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Wait or Pass? Promoting intersection’s cooperation via identifying vehicle’s social behaviorAccident Analysis & Prevention10.1016/j.aap.2024.107724206(107724)Online publication date: Oct-2024
  • (2024)New memory-one strategies of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma: a new framework to programmed human-AI interactionDiscover Psychology10.1007/s44202-024-00133-64:1Online publication date: 4-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Please, Go Ahead! Fostering Prosocial Driving with Sympathy-Eliciting Automated Vehicle External DisplaysProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36042657:MHCI(1-18)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
  • (2023)My Eyes Speak: Improving Perceived Sociability of Autonomous Vehicles in Shared Spaces Through Emotional Robotic EyesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36042617:MHCI(1-30)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2023
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media