interACT workshop @ the RSS 2017 – Road Safety & Simulation International Conference

On 16 October 2017 Prof. Dr. Natasha Merat (ITS Leeds) – a member of the interACT consortium organized a workshop entitled “External communication techniques for automated vehicles interacting with other road users in mixed traffic” at RSS2017 – Road Safety & Simulation International Conference. The aim of this workshop was to investigate what information pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers of manually controlled vehicles use to interact with each other in a mixed traffic environment, in order to inform on appropriate means of cooperation and interaction between these actors and automated vehicles. As starting point for the workshop, 10 speakers took the chance to quickly present their latest research in the domain within three-minute presentations. For interACT, Ruth Madigan and Gustav Markkula (both ITS Leeds), André Dietrich (Technical University Munich) and Anna Schieben (DLR) introduced the interACT project and interACT research methodologies. Thereafter, about 30 experts from industry and academia started a lively discussion to further exchange their research approaches for studying the interaction of automated vehicles with other road users and to elaborate the most challenging research questions. The discussions were inspired by two selected traffic scenarios from interACT. Additionally, the workshop participants provided their thoughts on successful communication methods and on how such communication capabilities of automated vehicles are likely to influence the design of roads in our future cities. A list of speakers and all presentations can be found here: http://rss2017.org/workshop-mixed-traffic