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Should I stay or should I go? An LED display for driverless cars aims to give pedestrians at a crossing the power to communicate with vehicles, signalling for the vehicles to stop or drive on.

Blink, created by researchers at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, turns the awkward dance of eye contact and hand gestures that happens when a car slows down while someone is waiting to cross the road into something driverless cars could understand.

The Blink design integrates an organic light-emitting diode display into the windscreen and rear window of the car and uses light signals to show pedestrians when the car is aware of their presence. If the car’s sensors detect a pedestrian nearby, a figure lights up that mirrors their movements, accompanied by a bleep.

If a pedestrian raises their hand as a stop sign, the figure turns green, and the car is prevented from moving forward. If they place a hand out to the side to motion the car forward, the figure turns red and the car can continue.

Gridlocked cities

But at the University of Nottingham, UK, isn’t convinced it’s a good idea to give pedestrians control over autonomous cars. He says that cities could end up gridlocked because pedestrians keep stopping cars from moving.

Manufacturers should wait until the novelty of driverless cars has worn off before they start creating car-pedestrian communications systems, he says. “We need to learn how people actually interact with autonomous vehicles.”

The concept effectively invests pedestrians with the car-stopping powers of lollipop men and women and the designers are not the only ones to consider the problem of communications between people and cars.

In 2015, Google was granted a patent that described , with a speaker that could call out “coming through” or “safe to cross”.

The idea is to help people feel more comfortable around driverless cars, says Blink co-creator . “This provides a really nice opportunity to rebalance the road power dynamic.”

His team hasn’t yet tested the device on a driverless car, but Bose says several automotive companies have expressed an interest in it.

Read more: Why driverless cars need morals