Vehicle-pedestrian interaction: A distributed simulation study

With emerging autonomous vehicle technologies, their interaction in a mixed traffic environment with existing road users such as human driven vehicles and pedestrians has been highlighted for further research and modelling. The real-world study of the interactions is typically limited for ethical and control reasons. In this paper, a distributed simulation involving human and automated driven vehicles is introduced and implemented to facilitate the evaluation of the interactions. This provides a safe and reproducible virtual environment that can involve multiple road users simultaneously. An experiment is designed and conducted to compare pedestrian crossing decision and behaviour between autonomous and human driven cars. In this paper the distribute simulation of the newly built Highly Immersive Kinematic Experimental Research (HIKER) pedestrian simulator and a desktop driving simulator is introduced, and part of the experiment results for vehicle performance between the autonomous and human driven vehicles in a pedestrian crossing scenario is presented and discussed.