Use of VR to understand the interactions between automated vehicles and vulnerable road users

The Transport and Planning department are organising a workshop for the 33rd IEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium that will be held from June 5th until June 9th in Aachen, Germany.

Abstract

The introduction of automated vehicles (AVs) may contribute significant changes in the future urban environment. Understanding the interaction between automated vehicles and vulnerable road users (VRUs) is essential for the development of automated vehicles in urban scenarios (e.g., intersection, shared space).

Virtual Reality (VR) provides possibilities to obtain complete experimental control and automatically collect behavioral data of vulnerable road users when interacting with automated vehicles. The usage of VR has attracted strong attention to play a key role in studying and better understanding interactions between autonomous vehicles and vulnerable road users.

This workshop aims to explore how to use VR to study and understand the interactions between automated vehicles and vulnerable road users. The workshop intends to exchange knowledge and experiences around the usage of VR to study interaction between AVs and VRUs, and thus will involve academicians, industry partners and policymakers across the fields. Besides presenting state-of-the-art research and technology development, this workshop discusses the current challenges and future directions of using VR to study AV-VRU interactions. Additionally, potential collaborations will be initiated among academicians, industry partners and policymakers.

Topics

The focus of this workshop is on the usage of VR to study and understand interactions between AVs and VRUs.

The proposed topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Virtual reality/Augmented reality/mixed reality
• Interaction between vulnerable road users and automated vehicles
• External Human Machine Interface (e-HMI) design
• Human factors
• Human-computer interaction

Programme

• Introduction: Workshop aim & agenda
• Short round introduction
• 1st keynote speaker: Prof. Dr. Klaus Bengler, Technical University of Munich, Germany (Online)
  “Can this be Real? Assigning VR the place”
• 2nd keynote speaker: Dr. Bilal Farooq, Ryerson University, Canada
  On the potential of virtual reality in context-aware training of automated vehicles when interacting with pedestrians + Q&A
• Kimia Kamal, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
  “Ordered-logit pedestrian stress model for traffic flow with automated vehicles” + Q&A
• 3rd keynote speaker: Dr. Joost de Winter, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
  "Pedestrian, cycling, and driving simulator fidelity: What do we really need?"  + Q&A
• Dr. Yan Feng, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
  Daniel Doornink, The New Base, Amsterdam
  SIPCAT project: Hands-on VR experiments & lessons learned
• Brainstorm session (experimental set-ups, interfaces, RQs, future direction)

Workshop format

The workshop will be a half-day programme and held in conjunction with the 2022 IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV22). It will be an interactive workshop and with a mixture of invited talks, regular paper presentations, hands-on VR experiments, and discussion rounds.

Chairs

Yan Feng

Yan Feng is a Postdoctoral researcher and leading the MXR lab (Mobility in eXtended Reality) at Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands). She specialises in using Virtual Reality to study mobility behaviour in urban spaces, including pedestrians, cyclists, and automated vehicles. She is passionate about conducting interdisciplinary research that combines engineering, design, architecture, and computer science. Her research interests include pedestrian behavior, Virtual Reality, AV-VRU interaction, wayfinding behaviour, evacuation behaviour, human mobility, social behaviour, human-computer interaction. She is now involved in the SIPCAT project, where she uses VR to investigate the interaction among pedestrians, cyclists, and automated vehicles in shared spaces.

Haneen Farah

Haneen Farah (h.farah@tudelft.nl), is an associate professor in the Department of Transport and Planning and co-director of the Traffic and Transportation Safety Lab. Her research interests include studying the implications of road infrastructure design on road user behaviour and traffic safety. In her research she combines her expertise in transportation engineering, with her curiosity in the fields of human factors and econometrics to study these connections. Before joining TU Delft, she was a postdoctoral researcher at KTH - Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. She received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering from the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology. In her current research she investigates the interactions of road users with connected and automated vehicles using virtual reality and driving simulators in addition to field tests.