Pedestrians play chicken with an autonomous vehicle

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how autonomous vehicles can resolve pedestrian interactions by adopting game-theoretic strategies, reducing stalls and improving traffic flow in real-world experiments.

Contribution

First experimental demonstration of a game-theoretic approach to pedestrian-AV interactions using real vehicles and human subjects.

Findings

Pedestrian behavior aligns with the Sequential Chicken model under safety constraints.

AVs can effectively use credible threats to manage pedestrian interactions.

Low collision risk values suggest pedestrians aim to avoid personal space invasions.

Abstract

Automated vehicles (AVs) are commonly programmed to yield unconditionally to pedestrians in the interest of safety. However, this design choice can give rise to the Freezing Robot Problem in which pedestrians learn to assert priority at every interaction, causing vehicles to stall and make no progress. The game theoretic Sequential Chicken model has shown that, like human drivers, AVs can resolve this problem by trading credible threats of very small risks of collision or larger risks of less severe invasion of personal space against the value of time due to yielding delays. This paper presents the first demonstration and evaluation of this approach using a real AV with human subjects and shows that pedestrian behavior under experimentally constrained safety conditions can be well fitted by Sequential Chicken, with a low time value of collision, suggestive of their planning to avoid proxemic personal space penalties as well as actual collisions.