Comparison of Child and Adult Pedestrian Perspectives of External Features on Autonomous Vehicles Using Virtual Reality Experiment

In the United States, pedestrians aged <= 14 suffer the highest percentage of motor vehicle collisions leading to injuries and fatalities. In part to reduce motor-vehicle related crashes, transportation researchers are pursuing the implementation of automated vehicles. Vehicle automation will eventually remove human control from the vehicle, but this may also remove interpersonal communication between pedestrians and human drivers. Therefore, many studies have investigated pedestrians' choice of features on autonomous vehicles (AVs) to facilitate communication of vehicle intention. The inclusion of child populations in these studies has been rare, however. This study investigated pedestrians' understandability of the external features on autonomous vehicles, considering different vehicle sizes and physics (speed and distance), and included both children and adults. The results revealed that children relied entirely on the communicating features of AVs to make their judgement on their safety, thereby adopted a higher risk strategy than their adult counterparts.