Vehicle-pedestrian interactions at uncontrolled locations: Leveraging distributed simulation to support game-theoretic modelling

Highly automated vehicles (HAVs) will need to interact with pedestrians in a safe and efficient way. Thus, investigating and modeling vehicle-pedestrian interactions at uncontrolled locations is essential to ensure safety and acceptance of these vehicles. Controlled studies are a valuable tool for these scenarios where all the tasks are not possible to be done in the real world and where some variables should be controlled with high accuracy for the development of models of human behavior. In this paper, a game-theoretic model was tested using data from a distributed simulator study. The study was conducted by connecting a desktop driving simulator to a CAVE-based pedestrian lab, providing a safe environment for testing the model’s ability to capture the gap acceptance behavior of pedestrians when interacting with a Human-Driven (HD) or an Automated Vehicle (AV). The results showed that, overall, the model could capture pedestrian behavior well and the pedestrians had lower crossing probabilities in front of the AV. This was seemingly due to differences in vehicle kinematics. Further analysis of the pedestrians’ data revealed the importance of given instructions to the participants in these types of studies. Lessons learned through this study were also used to suggest further ideas on how to design controlled studies for game-theoretic modelling.