Examining Pedestrian-Autonomous Vehicle Interactions in Virtual Reality

Autonomous vehicles now have well developed algorithms and open source software for localisation and navigation in static environments but their future interactions with other road users in mixed traffic environments, especially with pedestrians, raise some concerns. Pedestrian behaviour is complex to model and unpredictable, thus creating a big challenge for self-driving cars. This paper examines pedestrian behaviour during crossing scenarios with a game theoretic autonomous vehicle in virtual reality. In a first experiment, we recorded participants’ trajectories and found that they were crossing more cautiously in VR than in previous laboratory experiments. In two other experiments, we used a gradient descent approach to investigate participants’ preference for a certain AV driving style. We found that the majority of them were not expecting the car to stop in these scenarios. These results suggest that VR is an interesting tool for testing autonomous vehicle algorithms and for finding out about pedestrian preferences.