Interactions between pedestrians and automated vehicles (AVs) will increase significantly with the popularity of AV. However, pedestrians often have not enough trust on the AVs , particularly when they are confused about an AV's intention in a interaction. This study seeks to evaluate if pedestrians clearly understand the driving intentions of AVs in interactions and presents experimental research on the relationship between gaze behaviors of pedestrians and their understanding of the intentions of the AV. The hypothesis investigated in this study was that the less the pedestrian understands the driving intentions of the AV, the longer the duration of their gazing behavior will be. A pedestrian--vehicle interaction experiment was designed to verify the proposed hypothesis. A robotic wheelchair was used as the manual driving vehicle (MV) and AV for interacting with pedestrians while pedestrians' gaze data and their subjective evaluation of the driving intentions were recorded. The experimental results supported our hypothesis as there was a negative correlation between the pedestrians' gaze duration on the AV and their understanding of the driving intentions of the AV. Moreover, the gaze duration of most of the pedestrians on the MV was shorter than that on an AV. Therefore, we conclude with two recommendations to designers of external human-machine interfaces (eHMI): (1) when a pedestrian is engaged in an interaction with an AV, the driving intentions of the AV should be provided; (2) if the pedestrian still gazes at the AV after the AV displays its driving intentions, the AV should provide clearer information about its driving intentions.
Where Do Passengers Gaze? Impact of Passengers' Personality Traits on Their Gaze Pattern Toward Pedestrians During APMV-Pedestrian Interactions with Diverse eHMIs
Although automated driving systems have been used frequently, they are still unpopular in society. To increase the popularity of automated vehicles (AVs), assisting pedestrians to accurately understand the driving intentions and improving their perception of safety when interacting with AVs are considered effective. Therefore, the AV should send information about its driving intention to pedestrians when they interact with each other. However, the following questions should be answered regarding how the AV sends the information to them: 1) What timing for an AV to make pedestrians understand i…
Anticipation Before Action: EEG-Based Implicit Intent Detection for Adaptive Gaze Interaction in Mixed Reality
LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg（奥尔登堡卡尔·冯·奥西茨基大学）；TU Dortmund University（多特蒙德工业大学）；Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security（可信数据科学与安全研究中心）
Islamic University of Technology（伊斯兰技术大学）；University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；National University, Bangladesh（孟加拉国国立大学）
Human intention is an internal, mental characterization for acquiring desired information. From interactive interfaces containing either textual or graphical information, intention to perceive desired information is subjective and strongly connected with eye gaze. In this work, we determine such intention by analyzing real-time eye gaze data with a low-cost regular webcam. We extracted unique features (e.g., Fixation Count, Eye Movement Ratio) from the eye gaze data of 31 participants to generate a dataset containing 124 samples of visual intention for perceiving textual or graphical informati…
Compared to a manual driving vehicle (MV), an automated driving vehicle lacks a way to communicate with the pedestrian through the driver when it interacts with the pedestrian because the driver usually does not participate in driving tasks. Thus, an external human machine interface (eHMI) can be viewed as a novel explicit communication method for providing driving intentions of an automated driving vehicle (AV) to pedestrians when they need to negotiate in an interaction, e.g., an encountering scene. However, the eHMI may not guarantee that the pedestrians will fully recognize the intention o…
When asked, a majority of people believe that, as pedestrians, they make eye contact with the driver of an approaching vehicle when making their crossing decisions. This work presents evidence that this widely held belief is false. We do so by showing that, in majority of cases where conflict is possible, pedestrians begin crossing long before they are able to see the driver through the windshield. In other words, we are able to circumvent the very difficult question of whether pedestrians choose to make eye contact with drivers, by showing that whether they think they do or not, they can't. S…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Data Science Institute（数据科学研究所）
Eye movements have long been studied as a window into the attentional mechanisms of the human brain and made accessible as novelty style human-machine interfaces. However, not everything that we gaze upon, is something we want to interact with; this is known as the Midas Touch problem for gaze interfaces. To overcome the Midas Touch problem, present interfaces tend not to rely on natural gaze cues, but rather use dwell time or gaze gestures. Here we present an entirely data-driven approach to decode human intention for object manipulation tasks based solely on natural gaze cues. We run data co…
MindEye-OmniAssist: A Gaze-Driven LLM-Enhanced Assistive Robot System for Implicit Intention Recognition and Task Execution
Hubei Key Laboratory of Brain-Inspired Intelligent Systems, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（脑启发智能系统湖北省重点实验室，华中科技大学）；Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Education for Image Processing and Intelligent Control, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（图像处理与智能控制教育部重点实验室，人工智能与自动化学院，华中科技大学）；state key laboratory of intelligent vehicle safety technology, chongqing changan automobile co ltd（智能车辆安全技术 state key laboratory，重庆长安汽车有限公司）；Science and technology innovation center, China ship development and design centre（科技创新中心，中国船舶工业设计研究中心）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Nagoya University（名古屋大学）
Eye movement is closely related to limb actions, so it can be used to infer movement intentions. More importantly, in some cases, eye movement is the only way for paralyzed and impaired patients with severe movement disorders to communicate and interact with the environment. Despite this, eye-tracking technology still has very limited application scenarios as an intention recognition method. The goal of this paper is to achieve a natural fixation-based grasping intention recognition method, with which a user with hand movement disorders can intuitively express what tasks he/she wants to do by …
Honda Research Institute EU（本田欧洲研究院）；Honda R&D Co., Ltd. Innovative Research Excellence（本田研发株式会社创新卓越研究中心）
Shared control can help in teleoperated object manipulation by assisting with the execution of the user's intention. To this end, robust and prompt intention estimation is needed, which relies on behavioral observations. Here, an intention estimation framework is presented, which uses natural gaze and motion features to predict the current action and the target object. The system is trained and tested in a simulated environment with pick and place sequences produced in a relatively cluttered scene and with both hands, with possible hand-over to the other hand. Validation is conducted across di…
People are proficient at communicating their intentions in order to avoid conflicts when navigating in narrow, crowded environments. In many situations mobile robots lack both the ability to interpret human intentions and the ability to clearly communicate their own intentions to people sharing their space. This work addresses the second of these points, leveraging insights about how people implicitly communicate with each other through observations of behaviors such as gaze to provide mobile robots with better social navigation skills. In a preliminary human study, the importance of gaze as a…
The People's Gaze: Co-Designing and Refining Gaze Gestures with General Users and Gaze Interaction Experts
University of St Andrews（圣安德鲁斯大学）；University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Dalian Maritime University（大连海事大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）
We have pioneered the Where-You-Look-Is Where-You-Go approach to controlling mobility platforms by decoding how the user looks at the environment to understand where they want to navigate their mobility device. However, many natural eye-movements are not relevant for action intention decoding, only some are, which places a challenge on decoding, the so-called Midas Touch Problem. Here, we present a new solution, consisting of 1. deep computer vision to understand what object a user is looking at in their field of view, with 2. an analysis of where on the object's bounding box the user is looki…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Photo collections and its applications today attempt to reflect user interactions in various forms. Moreover, photo collections aim to capture the users' intention with minimum effort through applications capturing user intentions. Human interest regions in an image carry powerful information about the user's behavior and can be used in many photo applications. Research on human visual attention has been conducted in the form of gaze tracking and computational saliency models in the computer vision community, and has shown considerable progress. This paper presents an integration between impli…
External Human-Machine Interface based on Intent Recognition: Framework Design and Experimental Validation
College of Transportation and the Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering, Ministry of Education, Tongji University（同济大学交通学院和道路与交通工程教育部重点实验室）；Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学土木与环境工程系）
We use an immersive virtual reality environment to explore the intricate social cues that underlie non-verbal communication involved in a pedestrian's crossing decision. We "hack" non-verbal communication between pedestrian and vehicle by engineering a set of 15 vehicle trajectories, some of which follow social conventions and some that break them. By subverting social expectations of vehicle behavior we show that pedestrians may use vehicle kinematics to infer social intentions and not merely as the state of a moving object. We investigate human behavior in this virtual world by conducting a …
In this study, we investigated the effectiveness and user acceptance of three external interaction modalities (i.e., visual, auditory, and visual+auditory) in promoting communications between automated vehicle systems (AVS) and pedestrians at a crosswalk through a large number of combined designs. For this purpose, an online survey was designed and distributed to 68 participants. All participants reported their overall preferences for safety, comfort, trust, ease of understanding, usability, and acceptance towards the systems. Results showed that the visual+auditory interaction modality was th…
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, York University（约克大学电气工程与计算机科学系）；York University（约克大学）；Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science（电气工程与计算机科学系）；Toronto（多伦多）；ON, Canada（加拿大安大略省）
One of the major challenges that autonomous cars are facing today is driving in urban environments. To make it a reality, autonomous vehicles require the ability to communicate with other road users and understand their intentions. Such interactions are essential between the vehicles and pedestrians as the most vulnerable road users. Understanding pedestrian behavior, however, is not intuitive and depends on various factors such as demographics of the pedestrians, traffic dynamics, environmental conditions, etc. In this paper, we identify these factors by surveying pedestrian behavior studies,…
eHMI for All -- Investigating the Effect of External Communication of Automated Vehicles on Pedestrians, Manual Drivers, and Cyclists in Virtual Reality
Institute of Media Informatics, Ulm University（乌尔姆大学媒体信息研究所）；UCL Interaction Centre（伦敦大学学院交互中心）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Dongguk University（东国大学）
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) can prevent collisions by understanding pedestrian intention. We conducted a virtual reality experiment with 39 participants and measured crossing times (seconds) and head orientation (yaw degrees). We manipulated AV yielding behavior (no-yield, slow-yield, and fast-yield) and the AV size (small, medium, and large). Using machine learning approach, we classified head orientation change of pedestrians by time into 6 clusters of patterns. Results indicate that pedestrian head orientation change was influenced by AV yielding behavior as well as the size of the AV. Partic…
Injuries and fatalities for vulnerable road users, especially bicyclists and pedestrians, are on the rise. To better inform design for vulnerable road users, we need to conduct more studies to evaluate how bicyclist and pedestrian behavior and physiological states change in different roadway designs and contextual settings. Previous research highlights the advantages of Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) in conducting bicyclist and pedestrian studies. These environments do not put participants at risk of getting injured, are low-cost compared to on-road or naturalistic studies and allow resea…
Autonomous Vehicles (AV) will transform transportation, but also the interaction between vehicles and pedestrians. In the absence of a driver, it is not clear how an AV can communicate its intention to pedestrians. One option is to use visual signals. To advance their design, we conduct four human-participant experiments and evaluate six representative AV visual signals for visibility, intuitiveness, persuasiveness, and usability at pedestrian crossings. Based on the results, we distill twelve practical design recommendations for AV visual signals, with focus on signal pattern design and place…
RaycastGrasp: Eye-Gaze Interaction with Wearable Devices for Robotic Manipulation
College of Engineering Northeastern University Boston, USA；Khoury College of Computer Sciences Northeastern University Boston, USA；Department of Civil \& Environmental Engineering Northeastern University Boston, USA
TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Goethe University（歌德大学）
Assistive robots can potentially improve the quality of life and personal independence of elderly people by supporting everyday life activities. To guarantee a safe and intuitive interaction between human and robot, human intentions need to be recognized automatically. As humans communicate their intentions multimodally, the use of multiple modalities for intention recognition may not just increase the robustness against failure of individual modalities but especially reduce the uncertainty about the intention to be predicted. This is desirable as particularly in direct interaction between rob…
