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Well this is kind of a goofy question to answer, but honestly, I’m glad someone is thinking to ask it now versus waiting for an autonomous car to plow through a Times Square crosswalk: How will autonomous cars let us know they see us" If you think about it, this is not usually an issue for pedestrians and drivers interacting on the streets today. It’s kind of pointing out the obvious, but being either a pedestrian or a driver and interacting at a crosswalk is pretty easy because there are people involved.
Communication Breakdown
What happens when you take people, flawed and distracted though they may be, out of half of that equation" How will an autonomous vehicle be working, what it be needing to do, and how will it communicate that to us" For me, it has always been rather easy to tell what a car (and therefor its driver) is going to do. I spend a lot of time around cars and racetracks and end up paying a lot of attention to what cars are doing. So it’s easy for me to tell if a car/driver “sees” me and whether it’s okay to walk into the street. Dive, squat, roll, transitioning from one vehicle state to another is something you pick up at racetracks almost by instinct. “Yeah, he’s on the brakes early,” you can say because, over the years, you have been training yourself to notice things like weight transfer, causing the front to nose down by half an ...