Enabling Cooperative Pedestrian-Vehicle Interactions using an eHMI

Interactions between humans and automated vehicles (AVs) will become increasingly common in future traffic. Cooperative behavior enables comfortable and efficient resolutions of such interactions through joint actions. Thus, AVs need the ability to communicate their intention and planned behavior to outside road users to facilitate cooperation among the interaction partners. Many recent studies suggest external human-machine-interfaces (eHMIs) as a feasible way to realize the communication between AVs and other road users. These studies often focus on the design of eHMIs and evaluate their usability based on subjective measures from the perspective of the outside road user. There is only little research on the objective benefits of explicit external communication on the resolution of interactions with AVs. The decision making behind the activation of the communication and the consideration of the actual interaction in the communication are still open research topics. In this work, we present a communication framework that facilitates cooperation between an AV and pedestrians by communicating the vehicle's yielding intention to give right of way. We demonstrate the proposed system's ability to improve the joint utility as well as the driving comfort by empirically evaluating simulated interactions between AVs and pedestrians. The results indicate that timely communication leads to more efficient and more predictable pedestrian-vehicle interactions.