Urban planners and policy makers face the challenge of creating livable and enjoyable cities for larger populations in much denser urban conditions. While the urban microclimate holds a key role in defining the quality of urban spaces today and in the future, the integration of wind microclimate assessment in early urban design and planning processes remains a challenge due to the complexity and high computational expense of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. This work develops a data-driven workflow for real-time pedestrian wind comfort estimation in complex urban environments which may enable designers, policy makers and city residents to make informed decisions about mobility, health, and energy choices. We use a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) architecture to reduce the computational computation while maintaining high confidence levels and interpretability, adequate representation of urban complexity, and suitability for pedestrian comfort estimation. We demonstrate high quality wind field approximations while reducing computation time from days to seconds.
This paper presents a novel context-based approach for pedestrian motion prediction in crowded, urban intersections, with the additional flexibility of prediction in similar, but new, environments. Previously, Chen et. al. combined Markovian-based and clustering-based approaches to learn motion primitives in a grid-based world and subsequently predict pedestrian trajectories by modeling the transition between learned primitives as a Gaussian Process (GP). This work extends that prior approach by incorporating semantic features from the environment (relative distance to curbside and status of p…
Social-IWSTCNN: A Social Interaction-Weighted Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Neural Network for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction in Urban Traffic Scenarios
University of Gothenburg（哥德堡大学）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）
Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）；University of Stavanger（斯塔万格大学）；Elsevier B.V.（爱思唯尔出版集团）；STM Document Engineering Pvt Ltd.（STM文档工程私人有限公司）
Approximating wind flows using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods can be time-consuming. Creating a tool for interactively designing prototypes while observing the wind flow change requires simpler models to simulate faster. Instead of running numerical approximations resulting in detailed calculations, data-driven methods and deep learning might be able to give similar results in a fraction of the time. This work rephrases the problem from computing 3D flow fields using CFD to a 2D image-to-image translation-based problem on the building footprints to predict the flow field at pedestr…
Multi-Pedestrian Safety Warning at Urban Intersections Use Case of Digital Twin
Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学土木工程与工程力学系）；Data Science Institute（数据科学研究院）；Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学电气工程系）
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Toyota Motor Europe（丰田汽车欧洲公司）；CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security（CISPA亥姆霍兹信息安全中心）
Accurate prediction of pedestrian and bicyclist paths is integral to the development of reliable autonomous vehicles in dense urban environments. The interactions between vehicle and pedestrian or bicyclist have a significant impact on the trajectories of traffic participants e.g. stopping or turning to avoid collisions. Although recent datasets and trajectory prediction approaches have fostered the development of autonomous vehicles yet the amount of vehicle-pedestrian (bicyclist) interactions modeled are sparse. In this work, we propose Euro-PVI, a dataset of pedestrian and bicyclist traject…
Autonomous Vehicles navigating in urban areas have a need to understand and predict future pedestrian behavior for safer navigation. This high level of situational awareness requires observing pedestrian behavior and extrapolating their positions to know future positions. While some work has been done in this field using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), one of the few observed drawbacks of the method is the need for informed priors for learning behavior. In this work, an extension to the Growing Hidden Markov Model (GHMM) method is proposed to solve some of these drawbacks. This is achieved by bui…
Before the transition of AVs to urban roads and subsequently unprecedented changes in traffic conditions, evaluation of transportation policies and futuristic road design related to pedestrian crossing behavior is of vital importance. Recent studies analyzed the non-causal impact of various variables on pedestrian waiting time in the presence of AVs. However, we mainly investigate the causal effect of traffic density on pedestrian waiting time. We develop a Double/Debiased Machine Learning (DML) model in which the impact of confounders variable influencing both a policy and an outcome of inter…
Joint Pedestrian and Vehicle Traffic Optimization in Urban Environments using Reinforcement Learning
Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA（田纳西大学电气工程与计算机科学系Min H. Kao部门）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at George Mason University（乔治·马歇尔大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校工业与系统工程系）；Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA（田纳西大学土木与环境工程系）
DeCoR: Design and Control Co-Optimization for Urban Streets Using Reinforcement Learning
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA（田纳西大学，诺克斯维尔分校）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；University of California, Riverside, CA, USA（加州大学河滨分校）
To ensure pedestrian friendly streets in the era of automated vehicles, reassessment of current policies, practices, design, rules and regulations of urban areas is of importance. This study investigates pedestrian crossing behaviour, as an important element of urban dynamics that is expected to be affected by the presence of automated vehicles. For this purpose, an interpretable machine learning framework is proposed to explore factors affecting pedestrians' wait time before crossing mid-block crosswalks in the presence of automated vehicles. To collect rich behavioural data, we developed a d…
PEDESTRIAN: An Egocentric Vision Dataset for Obstacle Detection on Pavements
CYENS Centre of Excellence（CYENS卓越中心）；Open University Cyprus（塞浦路斯开放大学）；Department of Communication and Internet Studies（通信与互联网研究系）；Cyprus University of Technology（塞浦路斯技术大学）；AI Cyprus Ethical Novelties Ltd（塞浦路斯AI伦理创新有限公司）；Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts（多媒体与图形艺术系）
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Forecasting pedestrians' future motions is essential for autonomous driving systems to safely navigate in urban areas. However, existing prediction algorithms often overly rely on past observed trajectories and tend to fail around abrupt dynamic changes, such as when pedestrians suddenly start or stop walking. We suggest that predicting these highly non-linear transitions should form a core component to improve the robustness of motion prediction algorithms. In this paper, we introduce the new task of pedestrian stop and go forecasting. Considering the lack of suitable existing datasets for it…
University of Warwick（华威大学）；Vivacity Labs（维瓦西蒂实验室）
Reinforcement Learning is proving a successful tool that can manage urban intersections with a fraction of the effort required to curate traditional traffic controllers. However, literature on the introduction and control of pedestrians to such intersections is scarce. Furthermore, it is unclear what traffic state variables should be used as reward to obtain the best agent performance. This paper robustly evaluates 30 different Reinforcement Learning reward functions for controlling intersections serving pedestrians and vehicles covering the main traffic state variables available via modern vi…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Institute of High Performance Computing（高性能计算研究所）；Center for Frontier AI Research（前沿人工智能研究中心）
Data-driven approaches, including deep learning, have shown great promise as surrogate models across many domains. These extend to various areas in sustainability. An interesting direction for which data-driven methods have not been applied much yet is in the quick quantitative evaluation of urban layouts for planning and design. In particular, urban designs typically involve complex trade-offs between multiple objectives, including limits on urban build-up and/or consideration of urban heat island effect. Hence, it can be beneficial to urban planners to have a fast surrogate model to predict …
Vision-based Perception System for Automated Delivery Robot-Pedestrians Interactions
Laboratory of Innovations in Transportation (LiTrans)（创新交通实验室）；Data Science Program Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada, Toronto（数据科学项目多伦多 Metropolitan 大学）
