Self-driving vehicle acknowledgement of pedestrian presence conveyed via Light-Emitting Diodes

This paper describes a method of conveying perception information from a self-driving golfcart to nearby pedestrians via a Light-Emitting Diode (LED) strip. By equipping autonomous vehicles (AVs) with this feature, their performance as social robots is improved by building trust and engagement with interacting pedestrians; typical pedestrian-driver acknowledgement is replaced by visual feedback via lights which light blue for no nearby obstacle presence, and red for nearby obstacles. Various schemes for mapping detected obstacles to the LED display are discussed, the software and hardware systems are detailed, and a video demonstrates the working system in real application.