Conventionalized gestures for the interaction of people in traffic with autonomous vehicles

The first autonomous vehicles are already tested in the public traffic. The rapid development in bringing this technology on roads attracts growing attention of research in the human interaction with autonomous vehicles. This paper focuses on the interaction of other road users with autonomous vehicles. These road users may be pedestrians who negotiate their right of way, other human drivers sharing the same road, or human traffic control officers. In order to learn about these road users in general, this paper aims to identify first the formalized hand signals applied by officers. The paper answers the question whether there is a general and universal language to interact with traffic. If so, then future work can identify elements of this universal language in the gestures of other road users, and facilitate an understanding between them and autonomous vehicles.