Augmented Reality for Safer Pedestrian-Vehicle Interactions

Communicating the presence of pedestrians or bicyclists to vehicle drivers can lead to safer interactions with these vulnerable road users. Advanced knowledge about the presence of these users on the roadway is particularly important when their presence is not expected or when these users are out of range of the advanced safety systems that are becoming a standard feature in vehicles today. For example, having advanced knowledge of a pedestrian walking along a rural roadway is key to increasing driver awareness through in-vehicle warning messages that provide an augmented version of the roadway ahead. As connected vehicles start to enter the market, it is conceivable that when the vehicle sensors detect a pedestrian on a rural roadway, the pedestrian presence can be communicated to vehicles upstream of the pedestrian location that have not reached the destination. As part of the research presented, an experiment was conducted in which the detection of pedestrians by subjects was tested with and without an advanced warning about the pedestrian presence ahead. For comparison purposes, in addition to testing the detection of pedestrians as a result of advanced warning messages on rural roadways, the same situation was tested on urban roadways.