Sound Decisions: How Synthetic Motor Sounds Improve Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interactions
- 20 September 2020
- conference paper
- conference paper
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 12th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications
Abstract
Electric vehicles’ (EVs) nearly silent operation has proved to be dangerous for bicyclists and pedestrians, who often use an internal combustion engine’s sound as one of many signals to locate nearby vehicles and predict their behavior. Inspired by regulations currently being implemented that will require EVs and hybrid vehicles (HVs) to play synthetic sound, we used a Wizard-of-Oz AV setup to explore how adding synthetic engine sound to a hybrid autonomous vehicle (AV) will influence how pedestrians interact with the AV in a naturalistic field study. Pedestrians reported increased interaction quality and clarity of intent of the vehicle to yield compared to a baseline condition without any added sound. These findings suggest that synthetic engine sound will not only be effective at helping pedestrians to hear EVs, but also may help AV developers implicitly signal to pedestrians when the vehicle will yield.Keywords
Funding Information
- Robert Bosch, LLC
This publication has 20 references indexed in Scilit:
- Pedestrian Interaction with VehiclesPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2017
- Good vibrations: How consequential sounds affect perception of robotic armsPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2017
- Effect of additional warning sounds on pedestrians’ detection of electric vehicles: An ecological approachAccident Analysis & Prevention, 2016
- Ghost driver: A field study investigating the interaction between pedestrians and driverless vehiclesPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2016
- Sensory expectations elicited by the sounds of opening the packaging and pouring a beverageFlavour, 2015
- People Interpret Robotic Non-linguistic Utterances CategoricallyInternational Journal of Social Robotics, 2015
- Review of Semantic-Free Utterances in Social Human–Robot InteractionInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2015
- How Should an Electric Vehicle Sound? User and Expert PerceptionPublished by ASME International ,2013
- Product Sound Design: Intentional and Consequential SoundsPublished by IntechOpen ,2013
- How to use non-linguistic utterances to convey emotion in child-robot interactionPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2012