Safety envelope of pedestrians upon motor vehicle conflicts identified via active avoidance behaviour

Human reaction plays a key role in improved protection upon emergent traffic situations with motor vehicles. Understanding the underlying behavior mechanisms can combine active sensing system on feature caption and passive devices on injury mitigation for automated vehicles. The study aims to identify the distance-based safety boundary ("safety envelope") of vehicle-pedestrian conflicts via pedestrian active avoidance behavior recorded in well-controlled, immersive virtual reality-based emergent traffic scenarios. Via physiological signal measurement and kinematics reconstruction of the complete sequence, the authors discovered the general perception-decision-action mechanisms under given external stimulus, and the resultant certain level of natural harm-avoidance action. Using vision as the main information source, 70% pedestrians managed to avoid the collision by adapting walking speeds and directions, consuming overall less "decision" time (0.17-0.24 s vs. 0.41 s) than the collision cases, after that, pedestrians need enough "execution" time (1.52-1.84 s) to take avoidance action. Safety envelopes were generated by combining the simultaneous interactions between the pedestrian and the vehicle. The present investigation on emergent reaction dynamics clears a way for realistic modelling of biomechanical behavior, and preliminarily demonstrates the feasibility of incorporating in vivo pedestrian behavior into engineering design which can facilitate improved, interactive on-board devices towards global optimal safety.

• Record URL:
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82331-z
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/20452322
• Supplemental Notes:
  • © 2021 Bingbing Nie, et al.
• Authors:
  • Nie, Bingbing
  • Li, Quan
  • Gan, Shun
  • Xing, Bobin
  • Huang, Yuan
  • Li, Shengbo Eben
• Publication Date: 2021

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: References;
• Pagination: 3996
• Serial:
  • Scientific Reports
  • Volume: 11
  • Issue Number: 1
  • Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
  • ISSN: 2045-2322
  • Serial URL: http://www.nature.com/srep/index.html
• Publication flags:

  Open Access (libre)

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Behavior; Biophysics; Pedestrian movement; Pedestrian safety; Pedestrian vehicle interface; Reaction time
• Subject Areas: Highways; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01835832
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Feb 11 2022 2:24PM