Background
The @CITY research initiative brings together 15 partners from the automotive industry, supply industry, software development and universities. Subdivided into the two projects @CITY and @CITY-AF, concepts, technologies and prototypical applications are developed, enabling automated driving in complex urban areas. The aim is to make the city traffic of the future as safe, comfortable and efficient as possible for all road users. The research initiative is supported by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) with a funding volume of around 20 million euros.
The IAD was represented in the @CITY-AF project and conducted research in the sub-project “Human-vehicle interaction”. This sub-project focused on the interaction between the three protagonists: vehicle users, automated vehicles and other road users. The IAD dealt with the question of how everyday human forms of communication in road traffic (eye contact, gestures, etc.) can be “translated” to automated systems without misunderstandings occurring.
Further information on the project can be found at https://www.atcity-online.de/?language=en
Aims
In order to maintain the flow of traffic and resolve (potential) conflicts, road users communicate continuously through explicit and implicit signals. Although communication between different road users is typical for urban traffic areas, this has only been researched to a limited extent. In the scenario of highly automated driving (SAE L3), the vehicle must assume the communicative function of a human driver. This results in far-reaching questions regarding future communication between vehicle users, automated vehicles and other road users in mixed traffic in urban areas.
Method
The following tasks were carried out in the @CITY project to investigate these issues: First, scenarios in which communication between road users (including motorists, pedestrians and cyclists) occurred were comprehensively described. Subsequently, relevant communication channels for the transmission of information between automated vehicles and other road users were identified. The knowledge gained was then transferred to the design of an automated communication concept and implemented as a prototype. Finally, user studies were carried out, taking into account comprehensibility, safety, acceptance by end users and the targeted nature of communication in urban traffic.
Results
Use cases and scenarios of communication between road users in urban traffic areas were documented in a catalog. The detailed analysis of selected scenarios provides communication sequences that serve as a starting point for the human-centered development of external human-machine interfaces (eHMI) on the vehicle.
The human-centered developments and evaluations of eHMIs of automated vehicles for communication with other road users show that other road users benefit more from eHMI design solutions that not only signal the automation status, but also provide signals about the perception of other road users in the vicinity of an automated vehicle and signals about the intention of the automated vehicle. The eHMI principles developed in the project were presented as an application-oriented catalog of recommendations that can be used to support the development and evaluation of eHMI for automated vehicles in a targeted manner in practice, e.g. by using the eHMI principles as a checklist.
