Societal-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles requires them to coexist with human drivers, necessitating mutual understanding and coordination among these entities. However, purely real-world or simulation-based experiments cannot be employed to explore such complex interactions due to safety and reliability concerns, respectively. Consequently, this work presents an immersive digital twin framework to explore and experiment with the interaction dynamics between autonomous and non-autonomous traffic participants. Particularly, we employ a mixed-reality human-machine interface to allow human drivers and autonomous agents to observe and interact with each other for testing edge-case scenarios while ensuring safety at all times. To validate the versatility of the proposed framework's modular architecture, we first present a discussion on a set of user experience experiments encompassing 4 different levels of immersion with 4 distinct user interfaces. We then present a case study of uncontrolled intersection traversal to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework in validating the interactions of a primary human-driven, autonomous, and connected autonomous vehicle with a secondary semi-autonomous vehicle. The proposed framework has been openly released to guide the future of autonomy-oriented digital twins and research on human-autonomy coexistence.

翻译：自动驾驶车辆的社会化部署要求其与人类驾驶员共存，这需要二者之间建立相互理解与协调机制。然而，由于安全性及可靠性方面的限制，纯现实世界或纯仿真的实验方法均难以用于探索此类复杂交互。为此，本研究提出一种沉浸式数字孪生框架，用以探索和实验自动驾驶与非自动驾驶交通参与者之间的交互动态。该框架特别采用混合现实人机接口，使人类驾驶员与自主智能体能够相互观察和交互，从而在始终保障安全的前提下测试边缘场景。为验证所提框架模块化架构的通用性，我们首先通过涵盖4种沉浸等级与4种不同用户界面的用户体验实验进行讨论。随后，我们以无信号控制交叉路口通行案例研究，展示该框架在验证主要人类驾驶车辆、自动驾驶车辆、网联自动驾驶车辆与次要半自动驾驶车辆之间交互的有效性。所提出的框架已开源发布，旨在引领面向自动驾驶的数字孪生技术及人机共存研究的未来发展。