scholarly journals Does a Test Ride Influence Attitude towards Autonomous Vehicles? A Field Experiment with Pretest and Posttest Measurement

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 5387
Author(s):  
Manon Feys ◽  
Evy Rombaut ◽  
Lieselot Vanhaverbeke

Autonomous vehicles have the potential to disrupt the mobility system. Therefore, it is important to understand attitude formation towards autonomous vehicles. The focus of this study is on the private user’s technology acceptance of an autonomous vehicle. The study applies the determinants of technology acceptance to capture users’ attitude towards and intention to adopt autonomous vehicles. A field experiment with 27 participants was conducted to assess changes in determinants before and after a test ride with a level 2 automated vehicle. The automated vehicle was equipped with technology that allowed a hands-off, feet-off experience on a public road in real traffic. The results show that a ride has a positive and significant effect on attitudes towards autonomous vehicles. Additionally, participants with higher ratings of technology anxiety show a remarkable increase in attitude towards autonomous vehicles after the ride compared to participants with lower levels of technology anxiety. These findings indicate that experience with a partially automated vehicle has a potentially positive effect on the acceptance of autonomous vehicles. As such, our study illustrates the importance of continuous pilot testing with private automated vehicles to increase future user acceptance of autonomous vehicles.

Author(s):  
Krisztian Pinter ◽  
Zsolt Szalay ◽  
Gabor Vida

The application of Event Data Recorder (EDR) in passenger cars and vans has been compulsory in the USA since 2014. In the European Union, every passenger car and vehicle manufactured and released must have e-call systems since April 2018. However, neither the data recorded in Event Data Recorders regulated by the current standards nor the data recovered from e-call systems are enough to reconstruct the movements of the vehicle before and after the accident to a degree that the accident could be analyzed in the perspective of liability. The continuous expansion of autonomous vehicle functions – which will inevitably lead to completely autonomous vehicles – makes it particularly justifiable that all vehicles should possess EDR functions and that these data recorders shall store the satisfactory number of parameters for the vehicle's full movement reconstruction.In the article, we will present a process of defining a data package – which will include a definition process for both the data points and the frequency of measuring and recording – that enables the post-event reconstruction of the full motion process, the vehicle movements and the evaluation of liability issues in both regular and irregular operation of autonomous and partially autonomous vehicles.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanguk Lee ◽  
Rabindra Ratan ◽  
Taiwoo Park

The present research explores how autonomous vehicle voice agent (AVVA) design influences autonomous vehicle passenger (AVP) intentions to adopt autonomous vehicles. An online experiment (N = 158) examined the role of gender stereotypes in response to an AVVA with respect to the technology acceptance model. The findings indicate that characteristics of the AVVA that are more consistent with the stereotypical expectation of the social role (informative male AVVA and social female AVVA) foster greater perceived ease of use (PEU) and perceived usefulness (PU) than inconsistent conditions (social male AVVA and informative female AVVA). The study offers theoretical implications regarding the technology acceptance model in the context of autonomous technologies as well as practical implications for the design of autonomous vehicle voice agents.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-64
Author(s):  
Béla Csitei

The most frequent questions associated with autonomous vehicles both in the world press and in legal literature are those that look for the answer as to who is responsible for the accidents caused by these machines. However, only a few such questions deal with the issue that all factums apply different definitions, and the terminology is the basis of applying the particular factum. So, among others, answering the question is inevitable as to whether the autonomous or automated vehicle can be considered a ‘vehicle’, or the human sitting in the car can be considered the ‘driver’. If we decide not to consider the autonomous vehicle to be a vehicle, and – ad absurdum – we create an independent, sui generis category of vehicles, then the legal factums regarding the definition of the vehicle will not be applicable to the factum concerning the history of autonomous vehicles; however, their applicability will surely be questioned. With regard to this, I focus in my study on how the German Road Traffic Act (Straßenverkehrsgesetz) accommodates more advanced automated vehicles, and after this I compare the Hungarian and German rules that are relevant in terms of civil liability if we study the vehicles in question.


Author(s):  
Thilo von Pape

This chapter discusses how autonomous vehicles (AVs) may interact with our evolving mobility system and what they mean for mobile communication research. It juxtaposes a conceptualization of AVs as manifestations of automation and artificial intelligence with an analysis of our mobility system as a historically grown hybrid of communication and transportation technologies. Since the emergence of railroad and telegraph, this system has evolved on two layers: an underlying infrastructure to power and coordinate the movements of objects, people, and ideas in industrially scaled speeds, volumes, and complexity and an interface to seamlessly access this infrastructure and control it. AVs are poised to further enhance the seamlessness which mobile phones and cars already lent to mobility. But in assuming increasingly sophisticated control tasks, AVs also disrupt an established shift toward individual control, demanding new interfaces to enable higher levels of individual and collective control over the mobility infrastructure.


Author(s):  
Mhafuzul Islam ◽  
Mashrur Chowdhury ◽  
Hongda Li ◽  
Hongxin Hu

Vision-based navigation of autonomous vehicles primarily depends on the deep neural network (DNN) based systems in which the controller obtains input from sensors/detectors, such as cameras, and produces a vehicle control output, such as a steering wheel angle to navigate the vehicle safely in a roadway traffic environment. Typically, these DNN-based systems in the autonomous vehicle are trained through supervised learning; however, recent studies show that a trained DNN-based system can be compromised by perturbation or adverse inputs. Similarly, this perturbation can be introduced into the DNN-based systems of autonomous vehicles by unexpected roadway hazards, such as debris or roadblocks. In this study, we first introduce a hazardous roadway environment that can compromise the DNN-based navigational system of an autonomous vehicle, and produce an incorrect steering wheel angle, which could cause crashes resulting in fatality or injury. Then, we develop a DNN-based autonomous vehicle driving system using object detection and semantic segmentation to mitigate the adverse effect of this type of hazard, which helps the autonomous vehicle to navigate safely around such hazards. We find that our developed DNN-based autonomous vehicle driving system, including hazardous object detection and semantic segmentation, improves the navigational ability of an autonomous vehicle to avoid a potential hazard by 21% compared with the traditional DNN-based autonomous vehicle driving system.


Author(s):  
Xing Xu ◽  
Minglei Li ◽  
Feng Wang ◽  
Ju Xie ◽  
Xiaohan Wu ◽  
...  

A human-like trajectory could give a safe and comfortable feeling for the occupants in an autonomous vehicle especially in corners. The research of this paper focuses on planning a human-like trajectory along a section road on a test track using optimal control method that could reflect natural driving behaviour considering the sense of natural and comfortable for the passengers, which could improve the acceptability of driverless vehicles in the future. A mass point vehicle dynamic model is modelled in the curvilinear coordinate system, then an optimal trajectory is generated by using an optimal control method. The optimal control problem is formulated and then solved by using the Matlab tool GPOPS-II. Trials are carried out on a test track, and the tested data are collected and processed, then the trajectory data in different corners are obtained. Different TLCs calculations are derived and applied to different track sections. After that, the human driver’s trajectories and the optimal line are compared to see the correlation using TLC methods. The results show that the optimal trajectory shows a similar trend with human’s trajectories to some extent when driving through a corner although it is not so perfectly aligned with the tested trajectories, which could conform with people’s driving intuition and improve the occupants’ comfort when driving in a corner. This could improve the acceptability of AVs in the automotive market in the future. The driver tends to move to the outside of the lane gradually after passing the apex when driving in corners on the road with hard-lines on both sides.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 2244
Author(s):  
S. M. Yang ◽  
Y. A. Lin

Safe path planning for obstacle avoidance in autonomous vehicles has been developed. Based on the Rapidly Exploring Random Trees (RRT) algorithm, an improved algorithm integrating path pruning, smoothing, and optimization with geometric collision detection is shown to improve planning efficiency. Path pruning, a prerequisite to path smoothing, is performed to remove the redundant points generated by the random trees for a new path, without colliding with the obstacles. Path smoothing is performed to modify the path so that it becomes continuously differentiable with curvature implementable by the vehicle. Optimization is performed to select a “near”-optimal path of the shortest distance among the feasible paths for motion efficiency. In the experimental verification, both a pure pursuit steering controller and a proportional–integral speed controller are applied to keep an autonomous vehicle tracking the planned path predicted by the improved RRT algorithm. It is shown that the vehicle can successfully track the path efficiently and reach the destination safely, with an average tracking control deviation of 5.2% of the vehicle width. The path planning is also applied to lane changes, and the average deviation from the lane during and after lane changes remains within 8.3% of the vehicle width.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Koralewski

AbstractThe work presents a simulation model of a “driver–automation–autonomous vehicles–road” system which is the basis for synthesis of automatic gear shift control system. The mathematical description makes use of physical quantities which characterise driving torque transformation from the combustion engine to the car driven wheels. The basic components of the model are algorithms for the driver’s action logic in controlling motion velocity, logic of gear shift control functioning regarding direction and moment of switching, for determining right-hand side of differential equations and for motion quality indicators. The model is realised in a form of an application software package, comprising sub-programmes for input data, for computerised motion simulation of cars with mechanical and hydro-mechanical – automatically controlled – transmission systems and for models of characteristic car routes.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3850
Author(s):  
Bastien Vincke ◽  
Sergio Rodriguez Rodriguez Florez ◽  
Pascal Aubert

Emerging technologies in the context of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) have drastically evolved the industry’s qualification requirements. AVs incorporate complex perception and control systems. Teaching the associated skills that are necessary for the analysis of such systems becomes a very difficult process and existing solutions do not facilitate learning. In this study, our efforts are devoted to proposingan open-source scale model vehicle platform that is designed for teaching the fundamental concepts of autonomous vehicles technologies that are adapted to undergraduate and technical students. The proposed platform is as realistic as possible in order to present and address all of the fundamental concepts that are associated with AV. It includes all on-board components of a stand-alone system, including low and high level functions. Such functionalities are detailed and a proof of concept prototype is presented. A set of experiments is carried out, and the results obtained using this prototype validate the usability of the model for the analysis of time- and energy-constrained systems, as well as distributed embedded perception systems.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (12) ◽  
pp. 3425
Author(s):  
Huanping Li ◽  
Jian Wang ◽  
Guopeng Bai ◽  
Xiaowei Hu

In order to explore the changes that autonomous vehicles would bring to the current traffic system, we analyze the car-following behavior of different traffic scenarios based on an anti-collision theory and establish a traffic flow model with an arbitrary proportion (p) of autonomous vehicles. Using calculus and difference methods, a speed transformation model is established which could make the autonomous/human-driven vehicles maintain synchronized speed changes. Based on multi-hydrodynamic theory, a mixed traffic flow model capable of numerical calculation is established to predict the changes in traffic flow under different proportions of autonomous vehicles, then obtain the redistribution characteristics of traffic flow. Results show that the reaction time of autonomous vehicles has a decisive influence on traffic capacity; the q-k curve for mixed human/autonomous traffic remains in the region between the q-k curves for 100% human and 100% autonomous traffic; the participation of autonomous vehicles won’t bring essential changes to road traffic parameters; the speed-following transformation model minimizes the safety distance and provides a reference for the bottom program design of autonomous vehicles. In general, the research could not only optimize the stability of transportation system operation but also save road resources.


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