Shrinkable Arm-based eHMI on Autonomous Delivery Vehicle for Effective Communication with Other Road Users¶

Research Problem: When employing autonomous driving technology in logistics, small autonomous delivery vehicles (aka delivery robots) encounter challenges different from passenger vehicles when interacting with other road users.

Pre-study: We conducted an online video survey as a pre-study and found that autonomous delivery vehicles need external human-machine interfaces (eHMIs) to ask for help due to their small size and functional limitations.

Solution: Inspired by everyday human communication, we chose arms as eHMI to show their request through limb motion and gesture.

Prototyping: We held an in-house workshop to identify the arm’s requirements for designing a specific arm with shrink-ability (conspicuous when delivering messages but not affect traffic at other times).

Evaluation: We conducted two studies (a video-based and a 360-degree-photo VR-based) with 18 participants. We demonstrated that arm-on-delivery robots can increase interaction efficiency by drawing more attention and communicating specific information.

Please check our paper[pdf] for more details!

Authors¶

  • Xinyue Gui, The University of Tokyo
  • Mikiya Kusunoki, JAIST
  • Bofei Huang, JAIST
  • Stela H. Seo, Kyoto University
  • Chia-Ming Chang, The University of Tokyo
  • Haoran Xie, JAIST
  • Manabu Tsukada, The University of Tokyo
  • Takeo Igarashi, The University of Tokyo
Fig 1

video¶

Publication¶

Xinyue Gui, Mikiya Kusunoki, Bofei Huang, Stela Hanbyeol Seo, Chia-Ming Chang, Haoran Xie, Manabu Tsukada, and Takeo Igarashi. 2024. Shrinkable Arm-based eHMI on Autonomous Delivery Vehicle for Effective Communication with Other Road Users. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (AutomotiveUI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 305–316. https://doi.org/10.1145/3640792.3675716