Exploring the Design of Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction

Mahadevan, Karthik

Exploring the Design of Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction

dc.contributor.advisor	Sharlin, Ehud
dc.contributor.author	Mahadevan, Karthik
dc.contributor.committeemember	Somanath, Sowmya
dc.date	2019-11
dc.date.accessioned	2019-09-13T20:46:10Z
dc.date.available	2019-09-13T20:46:10Z
dc.date.issued	2019-09-12
dc.description.abstract	Autonomous vehicle research today places an emphasis on developing better sensors and algorithms to enable the vehicle to localize itself in the environment, plan routes, and control its movement. Surveying the general public reveals optimism about the technology but also some skepticism about its ability to communicate with vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists. In today's interaction with vehicles at crosswalks, pedestrians rely on cues originating from the vehicle and the driver. Vehicle cues relate to its kinematics such as speed and stopping distance while driver cues are concerned with communication such as eye gaze and contact, head and body movement, and hand gestures. In autonomous vehicles, however, a driver is not expected to be on-board to provide cues to pedestrians. We attempted to tackle the problem of designing novel ways to facilitate autonomous vehicle-pedestrian interaction at crosswalks. We propose interfaces which communicate an autonomous vehicle's awareness and intent as a means of helping pedestrians make safe crossing decisions. Through our exploration, we make several contributions. First, we propose a design space for building interfaces using different cue modalities and cue locations. From an early exploration of this design space, we prototype interfaces designed to facilitate autonomous vehicle-pedestrian interaction. The interaction between vehicles and pedestrians will become more challenging during the transition period until all vehicles on the road are fully autonomous. During this period which we term mixed traffic, vehicles of varying levels of autonomy will occupy roads, some of which will have drivers, others such as semi-autonomous which may have distracted drivers, and fully autonomous vehicles which may or may not have drivers. To study this problem, we contribute a virtual reality-based pedestrian simulator. Our final contribution relates to the evaluation of interfaces in the real and virtual world where we found their inclusion helped pedestrians make safe crossing decisions.	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Mahadevan, K. (2019). Exploring the Design of Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.	en_US
dc.identifier.doi	http://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/36996
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1880/110924
dc.language.iso	eng	en_US
dc.publisher.faculty	Science	en_US
dc.publisher.institution	University of Calgary	en
dc.rights	University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.	en_US
dc.subject	Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction	en_US
dc.subject	Human-Computer Interaction	en_US
dc.subject	Human-Robot Interaction	en_US
dc.subject	Interaction Design	en_US
dc.subject	Virtual Reality	en_US
dc.subject.classification	Computer Science	en_US
dc.title	Exploring the Design of Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction	en_US
dc.type	master thesis	en_US
thesis.degree.discipline	Computer Science	en_US
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Calgary	en_US
thesis.degree.name	Master of Science (MSc)	en_US
ucalgary.item.requestcopy	true	en_US