Exploring Comfortable Coexistence with Autonomous Pods in Pedestrian Spaces
Date
2024-06-26
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Abstract
The rapid advancement of autonomous vehicles (AVs) marks a significant milestone in transportation technology, revolutionizing mobility and urban planning. AVs promise to improve road safety, reduce traffic congestion, and contribute to environmental sustainability. As AVs become increasingly adept at navigating complex environments, challenges arise in integrating them into existing infrastructures, making it crucial to study their coexistence with people and how they are perceived. Pods, also known as low-speed autonomous transport systems (L-SATS), are emerging in pedestrian areas like airports and malls to help solve the last-mile problem. Nonetheless, their introduction into pedestrian-centred spaces presents new challenges for researchers in ensuring the comfortable sharing of these spaces with people. This thesis explores and investigates factors contributing to comfortable coexistence between pods and incidentally copresent persons (InCoPs) in pedestrian spaces. Through our exploration, we make several contributions. We begin by examining autonomous vehicles in urban spaces, including a preliminary exploration of situated visualizations, proxemics, and technology acceptance, which leads us to the notion of pods in pedestrian spaces. We then propose a design space for pods in pedestrian spaces, reflecting on various aspects of coexistence between InCoPs and pods. Our dimensions describe the pedestrian space, pod interactions, and the physical design of pods. Using the initial design space dimensions as a foundation and inspiration in design, we build a virtual reality (VR) testbed to facilitate research on the coexistence between pods and InCoPs. We design ten scenarios in the pedestrian space testbed. We conduct a user study, analyzing the significance of different variables, including pod quantity, pod group formation, passenger presence, and InCoP position. We provide insights on factors enhancing InCoPs' comfort, emphasizing the importance of an improved sense of control, space and freedom to move, passenger awareness, and the social behaviours of other pedestrians. By examining key factors that contribute to InCoP coexistence alongside pods, this thesis aims to offer initial research insights into the future integration of pods in pedestrian spaces to improve the comfort of InCoPs.
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Keywords
autonomous vehicles, pedestrians, virtual reality, pods, coexistence, incidentally copresent persons
Citation
Luchak, I. (2024). Exploring comfortable coexistence with autonomous pods in pedestrian spaces (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.