Milan, Modena and Ljubljana: Robotic assistance for safer street crossing
The Challenge
Road traffic injuries continue to represent a significant challenge. This places further pressure on the most vulnerable mobility groups: children, the elderly, and people with disabilities
Objective 1: Create a human-centric and user-friendly autonomous zebra pedestrian assistant.
Objective 2: Increase pedestrian safety. Especially for children, people with disabilities, and elderly.
Experimental questions:
1. Distributed sensing and increase awareness through V2X
- how is the presence of the rover altering the V2P/P2V communication
2. Adoption of autonomous rovers in public space
- how is the rover changing the way people act (based on findings from previous research)
3. Interaction between rover and pedestrians: HMI & user acceptance
- how people are interacting with the rover and which type of interaction is the best (lights, LED screen, no-communication …)
- how is past experience helping people trust rovers more (same person crosses the street multiple times)
The Solution
IPA2X is the result of an alliance between European living labs, research institutes, and OEMs on improving pedestrian crossings and assessing the user acceptance of robots. IPA2X will help children, the elderly, and people with disabilities to safely cross the street.
The robot is designed for excellent visibility for both drivers and pedestrians. With a height of 2.1m the robotic assistant is equipped with ultrasonic sensors, camera array and LIDAR. 4 multi-directional DOT Matrix LED monitors allow visual communication with pedestrians and road users.
Moreover, the deployed sensors and software (AI & RT computing, GPS & WiFi, 4G/5G module) enable direct communocation between the rover and cars for advanced CCAM solutions.
Making an impact
Pilots in three cities which aimed at testing HMI & user acceptance:
Ljubljana:
- AV Living Lab, a live ecosystem for the development of future human-centric mobility solutions with an area of 0.5 square km and 58,000 visitors per day
- Test group: Elderly; AV Living Lab identified the local organization “Simbioza” an NGO for intergeneration cooperation and lifelong learning, as the most suitable stakeholder for demonstration.
- Main pilot execution: 14 October 2022
Modena:
- Modena Automotive Smart Area (MASA), a real urban laboratory with infrastructure and 5G/IoT capabilities.
- Test group: School children (50 students)
- Main pilot execution: 30 September 2022
Milano:
- Collaboration with the police department, teachers, school officials, mobile operator and AMAT.
- Test group: School children (40 students); Istituto Comprensivo Statale “Arcadia” - incl. 3 primary schools (Arcadia, Baroni and Feraboli) and a secondary school.
- Main pilot execution: 11 October 2022
Lessons learnt
- Elderly and youth were excited about the new technology. They felt save using it.
- The people would like that the Robot could talk to them & that it has a larger traffic light indication.
- The Police considers it a good opportunity for reducing the effort of the policemen for these activities; this way they could use more time for other activities in the cities.