How to Design the eHMI of AVs for Urgent Warning to Other Drivers with Limited Visibility?

Abstract

The importance of an external interaction interface (eHMI) has grown in recent years. Most eHMI concepts focus on communicating autonomous vehicle (AV)’s yielding intention to pedestrians at a crossing. However, according to previous studies, pedestrians at a crossing rely mainly on the vehicle’s movement information (implicit communication) rather than information from eHMIs (explicit communication). This paper has the purpose of proposing a specific use case in which the eHMI of future AVs could play an indispensable role in the safety of other road users (ORUs). Often VRUs cannot see the traffic flow due to a series of parked or stopped vehicles, which is a frequent cause of fatal traffic collision accidents. Drivers may also not be able to see approaching pedestrians or other cars from the side for the same reason. In this paper, the impact of an eHMI is tested from the perspective of drivers with limited visibility when a jaywalker steps into the road. A combination of colors, shapes, and information levels is presented on an eHMI. We show that our proposed eHMI design, in the deadlock scenario of a jaywalker and a driver who both lack visibility, significantly reduced the reaction time compared to when there was no eHMI. In the experiment, the willingness to stop, varying from 0 to 5, was measured from the driver’s perspective. The results showed that most users felt uncertainty and did not move quickly when seeing the light band color alone. Textual information on the eHMI was significantly more effective in providing an urgent warning of this specific scenario than vertical and horizontal light bands with color without text. In addition, red color, blinking rapidly above 3 Hz, and egocentric messages were also necessary to reduce the PRT(perception response time). By using text-added eHMI (Vertical + Text eHMI), the mean time to achieve a score above 4 for willingness to stop was 2.113 s faster than when there was no eHMI. It was 2.571 s faster than the time until the slider of the participants reached the maximum level for willingness to stop. This is a meaningful amount of difference when considering a PRT of 2.5 s, which is the Korean road design standard. As eHMIs tend to be applied for smarter mobility, it is expected that they will be more effective in preventing accidents if the eHMI is standardized in autonomous driving level 2 to 3 vehicles driven by humans before fully autonomous driving becomes a reality.