Pedestrian and autonomous vehicle interaction: Towards affective crossing

In near future scenarios, self-driving vehicles will circulate in urban environments, and their behaviour should be adapted with respect to different types of pedestrians. In particular, vehicles should be able to provide effective feedback, especially when dealing with the most vulnerable people, such as older adults and impaired subjects. Within this perspective, this paper illustrates the experimental settings and protocol to study pedestrian and autonomous vehicle interaction, especially focusing on the safeness felt by each subject in different crossing conditions. To this end, besides traditional self assessment questionnaires and video recordings, movement and physiological data are collected as indicators of stress. From the analysis of this multimodal data, different classes of pedestrians could be defined, that will guide the definition of proper vehicle behaviour depending on their level of confidence and safety feeling. A preliminary data collection have been performed and ...