Milan, Modena and Ljubljana: Robotic assistance for safer street crossing trialled.

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)

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.