A Systematic Review of Challenging Scenarios Involving Automated Vehicles and Vulnerable Road Users

Automated vehicles (AVs) are of great potential to reduce crashes on the road. However, it is still challenging to eliminate all the possible crashes, especially those with vulnerable road users (VRUs). Thus, in this paper, we conducted a systematic review of challenging scenarios involving AVs and VRUs. We identified 39 relevant papers in the literature and categorized the challenging scenarios into three categories: human factors, environmental factors, and vehicle factors. For each category, we summarized the development, challenges, and potential solutions from the literature. Our findings aim to enhance the safety of VRUs when interacting with AVs, and multiple stakeholders must collaborate to 1) improve AI and sensor technologies and vehicle automation, 2) redesign the current transportation infrastructure, 3) design effective communication technologies and interfaces between vehicles, and between vehicles and VRUs, and 4) design effective simulation and testing methods to support and evaluate both infrastructure and technologies.