Communication – Key Capability for the Acceptance of Automated Vehicles

Communication – Key Capability for the Acceptance of Automated Vehicles

Johannes Reschke ¹*

¹ Audi AG

*Contact email address: johannes.reschke@audi.de

Abstract—In today’s traffic, communication between road users is absolutely essential to guarantee traffic flow, solve unclear situations and indicate yielding. Mainly pedestrians rely and depend on interactions with drivers and thus, most of them seek eye contact before crossing the street. This is expected to be a major challenge for the acceptance of automated vehicles. Previous work shows that an intuitive communication is hard to obtain and most signals and symbols are not recognized reliably. Here, very simple signals like rectangular shapes of LED-stripes performed even worse.

In this context, an online survey with more than 700 participants is conducted, which again proves that most symbols are not intuitive and there is a need to improve their meaningfulness. Furthermore, it clearly shows that a blue-green color, as proposed by organizations for standardization like SAE, GTB and ISO, does not add certainty to recognize the symbols intuitively.

This implies that a method to familiarize a large portion of the population with the new kind of signals is necessary. One approach is to display some signals already while driving manually and therefore to communicate the driver’s feedback and the future signals at the same time. In particular, deep learning algorithms show promising results to decide what signal to display. Using such algorithms, the manually driven vehicle learns to display symbols to communicate with pedestrians and thus to familiarize them in an intuitive way.

Keywords- Communication, Key Capability, Automated Vehicles