One of the central challenges in designing autonomous vehicles concerns passenger trust and sense of safety. This challenge is related to passengers' well-established past experience with non-autonomous vehicles, which leads to concern about the absence of a driver. We explored whether it is possible to address this challenge by designing an interaction with a simple robotic object positioned on the vehicle's dashboard. The robot greeted the passenger, indicated that the vehicle was attentive to its surroundings, and informed the passenger that the drive was about to begin. We evaluated whether the robot's non-verbal behavior would provide the signals and social experience required to support passengers' trust and sense of safety. In an in-person (in-situ) experiment, participants were asked to enter an autonomous vehicle and decide if they were willing to go for a drive. As they entered the vehicle, the robot performed the designed behaviors. We evaluated the participants' considerations and experience while they made their decision. Our findings indicated that participants' trust ratings and safety-related experience were higher than those of a baseline group who did not interact with the robot. Participants also perceived the robot as providing companionship during a lonely experience. We suggest that robotic objects are a promising technology for enhancing passengers' experience in autonomous vehicles.

A main challenge in incorporating autonomous vehicles into urban environments concerns communication with pedestrians crossing in front of them. We introduce a robotic object for facilitating natural crossing interactions by leveraging pedestrians’ existing crossing habits. The robot was designed to fit on the vehicle’s dashboard and simulate head gestures to indicate if it is safe to cross. We evaluated the perception of the robot as mediating the AV’s communication and the comprehension of its gestures, in an in-person experiment. Participants were asked to cross the road in front of a vehicle that was presented as having autonomous driving capabilities. The robot was placed on the vehicle’s dashboard in a location where pedestrians habitually look. The results indicated that when asked to cross, participants immediately looked toward the driver’s seat and easily noticed the robot. They consistently categorized the robot’s gestures into ”cross” or ”do-not-cross” categories and reported a strong sense of safety. Our findings suggest that robotic objects are a promising technology for mediating natural pedestrian-AV communication.