VIDI grant for Joost de Winter on gesturing autonomous vehicles
NWO has awarded 8 experienced researchers from TU Delft with a VIDI grant worth 800,000 euros. The grant enables them to develop their own innovative line of research and set up their own research group. Within the field of transport, Joost de Winter (3mE) has received the grant.
Joost de Winter (3mE): Gesturing automated vehicles
In the coming decades, our roads will be populated with an unprecedented mixture of automated vehicles (AVs) and human road users (HRUs) such as pedestrians, cyclists, and manually driven cars. A bottleneck is that current AVs do not communicate to HRUs, making AV-HRU encounters inefficient and potentially accident-prone.
De Winter’s research aims to devise novel AV-to-HRU communication methods. He will study the largely unexplored topic of how HRUs communicate with each other, and examine whether AVs’ gestures should be human-like (anthropomorphic) or nonhuman (mechanistic), and implicit (embedded in vehicle motion) or explicit (visual/auditory signs).
De Winter will also create two unique facilities, (linked simulators and a test track setup with synchronized data logging) to determine the effectiveness of implicit anthropomorphic and implicit mechanistic gestures in staged HRU-HRU/AV encounters. Furthermore, concepts of AVs that provide explicit gestures will be developed, tested, and demonstrated to industry on public roads.