Autonomous Vehicles as Social Agents: Vehicle to Pedestrian Communication from V2X, eHMI and HRI Perspectives

Communication between road users is crucial, as miscommunication and misunderstandings can lead to accidents, often bearing serious consequences in case Vulnerable Road Users (VRU) are involved. In this article we focus on communication solutions directed towards one particular group of VRUs, namely pedestrians. Various approaches for communication from vehicles to pedestrians have been proposed, including external Human-Machine Interfaces and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. Surprisingly, these works are rarely looked at together. Therefore we jointly survey these separate fields as a starting point for the development of effective methods for interactions between vehicles and pedestrians. We argue that merging the perspectives of different fields can be beneficial as their approaches often complement each other.