Autonomous driving technologies can minimize accidents. Communication from an autonomous vehicle to a pedestrian with a feedback module will improve the pedestrians’ safety in autonomous driving. We compared several feedback module options in a Virtual Reality environment to identify which module best increases public acceptance, legibility, and trust in the autonomous vehicle’s decision, and to identify preference. The results of this study show that participants prefer symbols or text over lights and road projection with no significant difference between symbols and text. Further, our results show that the preferred text interaction mode option when the vehicle is not driving is “Walk,” “Safe to cross,” “Go ahead” and “Waiting”, and the preferred symbol interaction mode option is the walking person as on a traffic light, with no significant preference between the cross advisory symbol and the pedestrian crossing sign.

AI Institute for Transforming Education for Children with Speech and Language Processing Challenges, National Science Foundation PI: Venugopal Govindaraju, co-PI: David Feil-Seifer, Amount: $20,000,000, Jan. 15, 2023 - Dec. 31, 2027