Can self-driving cars signal their intentions to pedestrians?

​Determining whether a wide road can be safely crossed requires social cues and cooperative communication between pedestrians and drivers. So, what happens if it’s a self-driving vehicle? Self-driving car company Motional believes making vehicles more expressive may be the key to maintaining these important signals.

While waiting at a crosswalk, Paul Schmitt, Motional's chief engineer, experienced what he calls "a dance with a glance." It's a quick and almost subconscious assessment: Where are the drivers of oncoming cars looking? Did they notice him? "With autonomous vehicles, half of these interactions don't exist," Schmidt said. "So, what cues are there for pedestrians to understand the vehicle's intentions?"

To answer this question, he The team hired animation studio CHRLX to build a highly realistic VR experience designed to test pedestrian reactions to various signaling mechanisms. Their research results were published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. Schmidt and his team say that exaggerated driving maneuvers - braking early or stopping in front of pedestrians - are the most effective ways to communicate their intentions.

The company is currently integrating the most promising expressive behaviors into its motion planning system and has also open sourced its virtual reality traffic environment so other teams can experiment.

The study also tested various expressive behaviors that implicitly signal to pedestrians that a vehicle is stopping for them. These include making the car brake harder further from the baseline, stopping a car's length away, adding hard braking and low-rpm sounds, and finally combining these sounds with an exaggerated nose dive, like It's like the vehicle is braking hard.

The team measured how quickly pedestrians decided to cross lanes, and conducted a quick survey of pedestrians after each trial to understand how safe they felt, how confident they were in their decision to cross lanes, and and how well the car’s intentions are understood. Short stops scored highest for safety and understanding the car's intentions.

Schmitt said that short stops received the best response, which was not surprising because the approach was inspired by the behavior of human drivers slowing down in front of pedestrians. Surprisingly, he added, there was little difference in responses to this baseline scenario with or without a driver, suggesting pedestrians were paying more attention to the movement of the vehicle rather than the driver behind the wheel. ​

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