Eye contact between drivers and pedestrians has long been a critical connection for safe street crossings, but researchers say eye contact may be less important than many transport officials and industry engineers believe when it comes to understanding cues exchanged by road users.
By the time eye contact is made, pedestrians have almost always made a decision on whether to cross, says Josh Domeyer. He’s a research engineer with the Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Centre, and development of autonomous vehicles has been his research focus for quite awhile—first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and now at the University of Wisconsin, where he is studying how drivers and pedestrians signal their plans to each other.
“Pedestrians actually look away about one second before they cross”, he says. While pedestrians believe they make eye contact with the driver of an approaching vehicle, more than 90% cannot see a driver at all from 30 m away or determine the driver’s gaze from 15 m away, according to a report from Domeyer and other researchers at MIT’s AgeLab. That implies a pedestrian’s decision to cross is based more on perceived speed or deceleration of the vehicle.
In an automated-vehicle era, automakers and tech companies have experimented with ways to communicate an AV’s intent to other road users. The now-defunct Drive.Ai installed external screens on its vans that would display messages such as “Waiting for you to cross.” In February 2019, Ford tested how pedestrians responded to a roof-mounted light bar that projected visual cues. These early attempts are emblematic of the current early stages of figuring out how AVs should best communicate with others.
Domeyer hopes his research will help software engineers write better control algorithms to allow self-driving cars to communicate effectively. “It’s not getting the thing to navigate around an object”, he says. “It involves people, and thus, there’s a social component and you can’t dismiss things like politeness and fairness when we are talking about technologies that affect people’s lives.”
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