Virtual Reality based Study to Analyse Pedestrian Attitude towards Autonomous Vehicles

What are pedestrian attitudes towards driverless vehicles that have no human driver? In this paper, we use virtual reality to simulate a virtual scene where pedestrians interact with driverless vehicles. This was an exploratory study where 15 users encounter a driverless vehicle at a crosswalk in the virtual scene. Data was collected in the form of video and audio recordings, semi-structured interview and participant sketches to explain the crosswalk scenes they experience. An interaction design framework for vehicle-pedestrian interaction in an autonomous vehicle has been suggested which can be used to design and model driverless vehicle behaviour before the autonomous vehicle technology is deployed widely

Studying Pedestrian’s Unmarked Midblock Crossing Behavior on a Multilane Road When Interacting With Autonomous Vehicles Using Virtual Reality

This dissertation focuses on the challenge of pedestrian interaction with autonomous vehicles (AVs) at unmarked midblock locations where the right-of-way is unspecified. A virtual reality (VR) simulation was developed to replicate an urban unmarked midblock environment where pedestrians cross a four-lane arterial roadway and interact with AVs. One research goal is to investigate the impact of roadway centerline features (undivided, two-way left-turn lane, and median) and AV operational schemes portrayed through on-vehicle signals (no signal, yellow negotiating indication, and yellow/blue negotiating/no-yield indications) on pedestrian crossing behavior. Results demonstrate that both roadway centerline design features and AV operations and signaling show significant impacts on pedestrians\u27 unmarked midblock crossing behavior, including the waiting time at the curb, waiting time in the middle of the road, and the total crossing time. Whereas, only the roadway centerline design features significantly impact the walking time, and only the AV operations and signaling significantly impact the accepted gap. Participants in the undivided centerline scene spent longer time waiting at the curb and walking on the road. Also, pedestrians are more likely to display risky behavior and cross in front of AVs indicating blue signals with non-yielding behavior in the presence of a median centerline scene. The inclusion of a yellow signal, which indicates the detection of pedestrians and signifies that the AVs will negotiate with them, resulted in a significant reduction in pedestrian waiting time both at the curb and in the middle of the road, when compared to AVs without a signal. Interaction effects between roadway centerline design features and AV operations and signaling are significant only for waiting time in the middle of the road. It is also found that older pedestrians tend to wait longer at the curb and are less likely to cross in front of AVs showing a blue signal with non-yielding behavior. Another research goal is to investigate how this VR experience change pedestrians’ perception of AVs. Results demonstrated that both pedestrians’ overall attitude toward AVs and trust in the effectiveness of AV systems significantly improved after the VR experience. It is also found that the more pedestrians trust the yellow signals, the more likely they are to improve their perception of AVs. Further, pedestrians who exhibit more aggressive crossing behavior are less likely to change their perception towards AVs as compared to those pedestrians who display rule-conforming crossing behaviors. Also, if the experiment made pedestrians feel motion sick, they were less likely to experience increased trust in the AV system\u27s effectiveness

Pedestrian Pathing Prediction Using Complex Contextual Behavioral Data in High Foot Traffic Settings

Ensuring the safe integration of autonomous vehicles into real-world environments requires a comprehensive understanding of pedestrian behavior. This study addresses the challenge of predicting the movement and crossing intentions of pedestrians, a crucial aspect in the development of fully autonomous vehicles. The research focuses on leveraging Honda\u27s TITAN dataset, comprising 700 unique clips captured by moving vehicles in high-foot-traffic areas of Tokyo, Japan. Each clip provides detailed contextual information, including human-labeled tags for individuals and vehicles, encompassing attributes such as age, motion status, and communicative actions. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks were employed and trained on various combinations of contextual data, along with basic bounding box coordinates. The best-performing models were identified based on mean squared error (MSE) for each prediction. Subsequently, decision trees were trained using the MSE data to classify the contextual features that consistently contributed to high or low prediction errors. This project sheds light on the significance of contextual behavioral data in predicting pedestrian motion and intention. By analyzing the impact of age, motion status, communicative actions, and other factors on prediction accuracy, the study offers valuable insights into the key elements that autonomous vehicles should consider when anticipating pedestrian movements in real-world settings. Ultimately, this research contributes to advancing the development of robust and safe autonomous vehicle systems by identifying crucial contextual cues for accurate pedestrian pathing predictions

Pedestrian and cyclist crashes in the Adelaide Metropolitan Area

Datasets employed. In-depth at-scene investigations of motor vehicle road crashes in the Adelaide Metropolitan Area were conducted in the period April 2002 to October 2005. The database from that study is used to throw light upon pedestrian and pedal cyclist crashes. The database of routinely-reported crashes is also utilised in respect of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities. Results. As pedestrian casualties are more numerous than cyclist casualties, the majority of results concern the former. In the 81 cases in the in-depth series, many different types of pedestrian accident can be identified. Of the 40 pedestrian fatalities in 2003-2006, 29 fell into at least one of the following three categories: at night, pedestrian was drunk, or pedestrian was elderly. Two points to note about this contrast between the two series are that (1) the in-depth study concentrated on crashes in normal working hours, and thus nighttime crashes are underrepresented, and consequently so is drunkenness, and (2) it is an open question whether there really are only three types of central story that cover the majority of pedestrian fatalities, or whether this finding is a consequence of the lack of detail in routine police data. Countermeasures. Taking the several series of crashes together, seven issues are prominent, and are discussed from the point of view of possible countermeasures: nighttime; drunkenness of pedestrians; visual obstruction by traffic; visual obstruction by roadside objects; possible improvements to other details of the road; trucks (visibility from the cab, and side protection); speed. There is also consideration of the competing needs for space of environmentally-friendly modes and motorised modes of transport: perhaps users of power-assisted cycles (slow motorcycles) are a potential natural ally of pedestrians and pedal cyclists in the demand for urban space.TP Hutchinson and VL Lindsa

Space networks: towards hodological space design for urban man, starting with a cognitive / perceptual notation

The main purpose of this thesis on Space Networks is to make a contribution to urban design0A iming at the level of the urban designer's or architect's prestructure (after the site has been seen,and before any plan/section/elevation drawings are done),it is meant for those designers involved in res earth themselves,and who accept the idea that they are,in a way, the first users of what they design.The additional purpose is to provide a sociological, psychological,and spatial scale context for dynamic design. Space is looked upon as a network.Where the space-of-possible- movement (taking the shortest/most agreable/most energy demanding/etc way, depending whether you are in a hurry/strolling/exercising yourself/etc respectively) is called Hodological Space.Movement --through-space-with-intention is used as a generator for design.We start with a proposed cognitive/perceptual notation of four spatial conceptual components: First with Section-Perspective (by which we do away with the facades,and considering the building not in isolation ---in the form of an endless isometric). Then the Tube (employing the anticipation,cognitively,of the projecting brain of man for his path of action),and also the Sequential (progressive sequences) and Binary (visual contrasts of 'wholes')- -these perceived as man moves through his Hodological space.There are six Chapters and an Appendix.Chapter I is introductory,and its three parts are extended in the Chapters that follow: Movement Through Space in Chapters 3 and 4,Space- Movement Notation in Chapters 5 and 6,and the Intended Fieldwork And Pilot Questionnaires in the Appendix.In Chapter 2 the clarifying distinction is made between space for activity and space for profit.Which issue,far from a refinement,shifts the problem back to where it belongs: the society values --of which the designer himself partakes. ln Chapter 3 man is not seen from the stimulus -response,but the cognitive psychology side: not passive,but projecting his intentions into his environment --and if it goes a bit too far in that direction it is in compensation for the opposite view.ln Chapter 4 a comprehensive classification of space,into Hodological,Ambient,and Personal,is made for the designer's understanding and use.All three spaces are more fundamental to him than Euclidean space which is significant only in relation to them.ln Chapter 5 the four-component Notation is a rticulated into the cognitive /perceptual anthropological model of cognitive anticipation (see Tube),and perceptual experience (see Sequential and Binary),together with a comparative discussion of the other notatorst work,ranging between the scales of landscape design (Halprin) and microspace behaviour (Hall),In Chapter 6 the proposition of using the present anthropological model of a cognitive /perceptual notation of design-for-movement has been taken up as a process employed in experimental design.The program of designing for Hodological space --as well as for Ambient space which accompanies progress through Hodological space --links psychological research to design for the pedestrian

GPT-4V Takes the Wheel: Promises and Challenges for Pedestrian Behavior Prediction

Predicting pedestrian behavior is the key to ensure safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles. While deep learning methods have been promising by learning from annotated video frame sequences, they often fail to fully grasp the dynamic interactions between pedestrians and traffic, crucial for accurate predictions. These models also lack nuanced common sense reasoning. Moreover, the manual annotation of datasets for these models is expensive and challenging to adapt to new situations. The advent of Vision Language Models (VLMs) introduces promising alternatives to these issues, thanks to their advanced visual and causal reasoning skills. To our knowledge, this research is the first to conduct both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of VLMs in the context of pedestrian behavior prediction for autonomous driving. We evaluate GPT-4V(ision) on publicly available pedestrian datasets: JAAD and WiDEVIEW. Our quantitative analysis focuses on GPT-4V's ability to predict pedestrian behavior in current and future frames. The model achieves a 57% accuracy in a zero-shot manner, which, while impressive, is still behind the state-of-the-art domain-specific models (70%) in predicting pedestrian crossing actions. Qualitatively, GPT-4V shows an impressive ability to process and interpret complex traffic scenarios, differentiate between various pedestrian behaviors, and detect and analyze groups. However, it faces challenges, such as difficulty in detecting smaller pedestrians and assessing the relative motion between pedestrians and the ego vehicle

Child development and the aims of road safety education

Pedestrian accidents are one of the most prominent causes of premature injury, handicap and death in the modern world. In children, the problem is so severe that pedestrian accidents are widely regarded as the most serious of all health risks facing children in developed countries. Not surprisingly, educational measures have long been advocated as a means of teaching children how to cope with traffic and substantial resources have been devoted to their development and provision. Unfortunately, there seems to be a widespread view at the present time that education has not achieved as much as had been hoped and that there may even be quite strict limits to what can be achieved through education. This would, of course, shift the emphasis away from education altogether towards engineering or urban planning measures aimed at creating an intrinsically safer environment in which the need for education might be reduced or even eliminated. However, whilst engineering measures undoubtedly have a major role to play in the effort to reduce accidents, this outlook is both overly optimistic about the benefits of engineering and overly pessimistic about the limitations of education. At the same time, a fresh analysis is clearly required both of the aims and methods of contemporary road safety education. The present report is designed to provide such an analysis and to establish a framework within which further debate and research can take place

An intelligent pedestrian device: social, psychological and other issues of feasibility

An Intelligent Pedestrian Device (IPD) is a new concept in pedestrian safety. It is defined as a microprocessor based information device which detects the approach of oncoming vehicles and informs the pedestrian whether or not it is safe to cross. IPDs could be portable or fixed to a roadside station. They could help reduce pedestrian accidents, which cost £2681 million in the UK in 1994. This study aims to assess whether the concept is socially acceptable and what the design criteria might be. A study of social acceptance involved group interviews of 5-10 participants with 84 pedestrians in five categories: adults aged 18-60, elderly aged 65+, visually restricted, parents of children aged 5-9 and children aged 10-14. The results suggest that vulnerable pedestrians are more positive about the device than the more able-bodied. Theories that may help explain this are discussed and it is concluded that, with education and marketing, the IPD could gain a degree of social acceptance. Observation of more than 900 pedestrian crossing movements at four different sites showed a range of behaviours, and that people often take risks in order to reduce delay. IPDs will require pedestrians to change some of their behaviours, especially those that are risky. Legal acceptance will demand high levels of costly product research and development, and a portable device will not be technologically feasible until well into the next century. However, the wider social benefits of IPDs may be worth the costs. An outline of design criteria for basic and sophisticated portable IPDs is given, and alternative functions are suggested. It is recommended that further work concentrate on developing software and hardware for fixed modes of IPD. It is concluded that, ultimately, acceptance will probably depend on whether Government decides that the IPD has a place in the road environment of the future