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Poster Presentation at the Conference

Bike/Ped

Session: Meet the Author - Poster Session PS-5

1374376 - Exploring the Perceptions of Students at Educational Institution Towards Different External Human Machine Interface Designs of Autonomous Vehicles

Friday, June 16, 2023
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM CST
Room: Governor's Grand Ballroom
Salon ABC
TRACK: Poster Presentation
The non-verbal interaction between Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) and human drivers play a crucial role in enabling the VRUs to make safe road crossing decisions. However, in the case of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), such interactions are not possible due to the absence of a human driver. The risk of conflicts between AVs and VRUs become even more pronounced in settings with high frequency of pedestrian crossings such as within university campuses. Several designs and concepts for external Human Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) have been proposed to help AVs to communicate their non-verbal intent to VRUs. The evaluation of these eHMIs have been an open research question. Researchers have sought to evaluate these proposed eHMIs through various means, such as survey methods, virtual reality (VR) experiments, and real-world experiments with simulated AVs. As we move towards a future with high deployment of fully autonomous vehicles, it is important to understand the perceptions of VRUs towards these eHMI designs to determine the standard eHMI design to adopt in AVs. Motivated by this, we have conducted a survey to understand the perceptions of college students towards eight different eHMI designs based on three measures: increasing trust towards AV, ease of comprehensibility and ease of visibility of these eHMIs. The results show that participants had the most positive perceptions towards text based eHMIs whereas mobile notification based ones were perceived the worst. Furthermore, regardless of their perception, the majority of participants reported they would feel safer if AVs have some form of eHMI on them.

Learning Objectives:

Attendees can expect to learn the following from this session:
  • assess the perceptions of the college students towards the individual external Human machine Interface (eHMI) designs based on ease of visibility, ease of comprehension, and increasing trust towards AVs
  • identify the college students' most preferred choice of external Human machine Interface (eHMI) out of all the presented options and their opinion on how to improve it
  • obtain college students' ideas regarding an alternative external Human machine Interface (eHMI) design based on the perceptions towards the eHMI options presented to them