How should automated heavy vehicle interact with its surroundings?
That is what a new SAFER associated project in the research area of Road user behavior; External Interaction Principles for Creating Trust in Heavy Automated Vehicles, will help the researchers to understand better. The project aims to study the external interactions needed in the scenario where automated vehicles are introduced on public roads with mixed manual and automated traffic, in order to ensure road user acceptance and trust, traffic efficiency and safety.
Given that heavy automated vehicles are not widely available in traffic today, it is largely unknown if other road users in the transport system will be able to understand intentions of these vehicles. It is likely that the automated vehicles of the future might need a way to communicate their intentions to the surrounding road users. How this should be done is now a task in SAFER's new associated project.
Azra Habibovic, Research area director at SAFER tells more:
“This project is significantly different from other projects in this area since it addresses the interaction between heavy automated vehicles, both buses and trucks, and other road users. Research to-date has mostly been about interactions automated between passenger cars and pedestrians. This new SAFER-associated project will not only study interactions with pedestrians, cyclists and drivers in ordinary cars will also be included.
The project, funded by the Strategic Vehicle Research and Innovation programme (FFI) via its subprogramme EMK, has just started up and will continue for almost two years. The budget is 10 MSEK. SAFER’s project partners are RISE and Scania. One PhD-student will work in the project up to licentiate.
