Editorial

interACT has celebrated its first anniversary in May and looks back to a very successful first project year! In the last six months we finalized the observational studies on human-human interaction at three European test sites, defined preliminary interaction strategies for the interaction of the Automated Vehicle with other traffic participants and came up with the overall concept for the central intelligence of the Automated Vehicle – the Cooperation and Communication Planning Unit. We further took the opportunity to raise awareness about the interACT project and presented first project activities at several conferences, meetings, in a webinar and at the TRA 2018 in Vienna.

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Findings of the observational studies in three European Countries

Implicit and explicit communication between Human Road Users takes place every day. As a basis for the design of AV behavior and interaction, we were interested to know more about how humans communicate in complex traffic environments and are happy to announce that we successfully completed the cross-cultural observations examining how Human Road Users (HRU) interact. The observations were carried out in three major European cities: Leeds (UK), Athens (Greece) and Munich (Germany). 

Developing expectation-conforming interaction strategies for automated vehicles

The interACT project aims to develop overall interaction strategies to control the interaction between the AV and the on-board user as well as between the AV and other TPs in the surrounding. During the last months, we had several discussion within the WP4 design team to come up with the preliminary interaction strategies for the interact must-have use cases.

The Cooperation and Communication Planning Unit (CCPU)

The Cooperation and Communication Planning Unit (CCPU) is the central intelligence of the interACT automated vehicle. Safe integration of automated vehicles in mixed traffic environments requires the ability, from the automated vehicle's side, to interact with the other traffic participants in an intuitive and expectation-conforming manner.

External HMI Workshop, 19th April, Vienna, Austria

On April 19 2018, the interACT Consortium organized a workshop on external HMI design for Automated Vehicles in Vienna and invited several international stakeholders with a specific background in HMI design and Human Factors to join us for this event. Twenty participants from the US, Japan, and the EU participated in the workshop. We took the chance to discuss with the experts from industry and academia the most relevant research questions and challenges in the field of external HMI (eHMI) design.

CAD Webinar Series (IX): interACT project

A webinar dedicated to the interACT project under the title “Designing cooperative interaction of automated vehicles with other road users – the EU project interACT” was organised by CARTRE project on the 9th of May 2018. Τhe webinar presented the first results of our project on scenario definition and the observation of human-human interaction in mixed traffic environments from three European countries (Germany, Greece, & the UK).

2018 VDI Tagung: Optische Technologien conference, 5th – 6th June, Germany

Jan-Henning Willrodt from HELLA presented his very interesting paper entitled 'Directed Light for Personalized Addressing of Pedestrians and Cyclists by Automated Vehicles’ on the 6^th of June at the 2018 VDI Tangung: Optische Technologien conference which was attended by 200 participants.

3rd interACT GA meeting, 6th – 8th June, Athens, Greece

The 3rd interACT GA meeting was hosted by ICCS in Athens. The first day of the meeting was a great opportunity to discuss the outcomes of the last period and to plan the activities of the months to come. The second and third day of the meeting were fully dedicated to our technical workshops.

15th Conference on Autonomous Systems 2018, 11th -15th June, Baden Baden, Germany

Fanta Camara from ITS Leeds presented the paper entitled ‘’ Filtration analysis of pedestrian-vehicle interactions for autonomous vehicles control’’ at the 15th Conference on Autonomous Systems 2018 on the 11th of June, 2018.