The social behavior of autonomous vehicles

Autonomous vehicles will drive without human intervention and share the road with other road users such as pedestrians and human drivers. We understand autonomous vehicles as moving embodied agents; ubicomp systems whose behavior can be observed in the real world. The vehicles' ability to sense the outside world is improving rapidly but they lack human abilities to sense and interpret the subtle cues of other road users. Nevertheless, other road users may perceive them as acting intelligently when encountering them in traffic. The autonomous vehicle becomes part of a complex socio-technical system and has to interact with all these actors in a socially accepted manner. This opens up a challenging design space to be explored by observations and iterative prototyping.