A Design Space for External Communication of Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles are on the verge of entering the mass market. Communication between these vehicles with vulnerable road users could increase safety and ease their introduction by helping to understand the vehicle’s intention. Numerous communication modalities and messages were proposed and evaluated. However, these explorations do not account for the factors described in communication theory. Therefore, we propose a two-part design space consisting of a concept part with 3 dimensions and a situation part with 6 dimensions based on a literature review on communication theory and a focus group with experts (N=4) on communication. We found that most work until now does not address situation-specific aspects of such communication.