Using Unwrapped Full Color Space Recording to Measure the Exposedness of Vehicle Exterior Parts for External Human Machine Interfaces

TL;DR

This study employs unwrapped full color space recording and Unity simulations to assess vehicle exterior visibility for pedestrian communication, suggesting a distributed placement approach for external human-machine interfaces.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method using color unwrapping and simulations to evaluate vehicle exterior visibility for eHMIs, proposing a distributed placement strategy.

Findings

Bumper, grill, and hood are most visible to pedestrians.

Obstructions by other vehicles reduce visibility of these parts.

Distributed eHMI placement on windshield and fenders is recommended.

Abstract

One of the concerns with autonomous vehicles is their ability to communicate their intent to other road users, specially pedestrians, in order to prevent accidents. External Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) are the proposed solution to this issue, through the introduction of electronic devices on the exterior of a vehicle that communicate when the vehicle is planning on slowing down or yielding. This paper uses the technique of unwrapping the faces of a mesh onto a texture where every pixel is a unique color, as well as a series of animated simulations made and ran in the Unity game engine, to measure how many times is each point on a 2015 Ford F-150 King Ranch is unobstructed to a pedestrian attempting to cross the road at a four-way intersection. By cross-referencing the results with a color-coded map of the labeled parts on the exterior of the vehicle, it was concluded that while the bumper, grill, and hood were the parts of the vehicle visible to the crossing pedestrian most often, the existence of other vehicles on the same lane that might obstruct the view of these makes them insufficient. The study recommends instead a distributive approach to eHMIs by using both the windshield and frontal fenders as simultaneous placements for these devices.