Importance of Instruction for Pedestrian-Automated Driving Vehicle Interaction with an External Human Machine Interface: Effects on Pedestrians' Situation Awareness, Trust, Perceived Risks and Decision Making

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that providing instructions about an automated vehicle's external communication interface significantly enhances pedestrians' understanding, trust, and decision-making during road-crossing interactions, aligning their perceptions closer to manual vehicles.

Contribution

It introduces the importance of instructing pedestrians on eHMI rationale to improve interaction outcomes with automated vehicles, a novel approach in AV-pedestrian communication research.

Findings

eHMI improves pedestrians' situational awareness.

Instructions enhance understanding of AV intentions.

Subjective feelings and decision hesitation are significantly improved.

Abstract

Compared to a manual driving vehicle (MV), an automated driving vehicle lacks a way to communicate with the pedestrian through the driver when it interacts with the pedestrian because the driver usually does not participate in driving tasks. Thus, an external human machine interface (eHMI) can be viewed as a novel explicit communication method for providing driving intentions of an automated driving vehicle (AV) to pedestrians when they need to negotiate in an interaction, e.g., an encountering scene. However, the eHMI may not guarantee that the pedestrians will fully recognize the intention of the AV. In this paper, we propose that the instruction of the eHMI's rationale can help pedestrians correctly understand the driving intentions and predict the behavior of the AV, and thus their subjective feelings (i.e., dangerous feeling, trust in the AV, and feeling of relief) and decision-making are also improved. The results of an interaction experiment in a road-crossing scene indicate that the participants were more difficult to be aware of the situation when they encountered an AV w/o eHMI compared to when they encountered an MV; further, the participants' subjective feelings and hesitation in decision-making also deteriorated significantly. When the eHMI was used in the AV, the situational awareness, subjective feelings and decision-making of the participants regarding the AV w/ eHMI were improved. After the instruction, it was easier for the participants to understand the driving intention and predict driving behavior of the AV w/ eHMI. Further, the subjective feelings and the hesitation related to decision-making were improved and reached the same standards as that for the MV.