The impact of vehicle appearance and vehicle behavior on pedestrian interaction with autonomous vehicles

In this paper, we present the preliminary results of a study that aims to investigate the role of an approaching vehicle’s behavior and outer appearance in determining pedestrians’ decisions while crossing a street. Concerning appearance, some vehicles are designed to look more assertive than others, and it is believed that vehicle appearance may reflect the driver’s social behavior in traffic. In the case of autonomous vehicles, since the human driver no longer controls the vehicle’s action, the question arises whether pedestrians treat autonomous and manually-driven vehicles differently when deciding to cross the street. We devised an experiment to determine the impact of the behavioral and physical attributes of a vehicle on pedestrians’ road-crossing decisions, both for manually-driven and autonomous vehicles. Preliminary results show that in both cases, distance and speed play a dominant role in pedestrians’ decision to cross a road when compared to the vehicle’s size and appearance.