ABSTRACT

How will pedestrians and cyclists interact with self-driving cars when there is no human driver? To find answers to this question we need a secure experimental design in which pedestrians can interact with a car that appears to drive on its own. In Ghost Driver we staged a fake autonomous car by installing LIDARs, cameras and decals on the outside of the vehicle and by covering the driver with a seat costume so that it appeared that there was no driver in the car. In initial field studies we found that this Wizard-of-Oz technique convinced more than 80% of the participants that the car was driving autonomously without a driver. Consequently the Ghost Driver methodology could become a platform for further investigation of how pedestrians or cyclists interact with driverless vehicles.