Autonomous robots and vehicles are expected to soon become an integral part of our environment. Unsatisfactory issues regarding interaction with existing road users, performance in mixed-traffic areas and lack of interpretable behavior remain key obstacles. To address these, we present a physics-based neural network, based on a hybrid approach combining a social force model extended by group force (SFMG) with Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) to predict pedestrian trajectories considering its interaction with static obstacles, other pedestrians and pedestrian groups. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the model with respect to realistic prediction, prediction performance and prediction "interpretability". Initial results suggest, the model even when solely trained on a synthetic dataset, can predict realistic and interpretable trajectories with better than state-of-the-art accuracy.
Urban environments pose a significant challenge for autonomous vehicles (AVs) as they must safely navigate while in close proximity to many pedestrians. It is crucial for the AV to correctly understand and predict the future trajectories of pedestrians to avoid collision and plan a safe path. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown promising results in accurately predicting pedestrian trajectories, relying on large amounts of annotated real-world data to learn pedestrian behavior. However, collecting and annotating these large real-world pedestrian datasets is costly in both time and labor. Thi…
This paper presents a pedestrian motion model that includes both low level trajectory patterns, and high level discrete transitions. The inclusion of both levels creates a more general predictive model, allowing for more meaningful prediction and reasoning about pedestrian trajectories, as compared to the current state of the art. The model uses an iterative clustering algorithm with (1) Dirichlet Process Gaussian Processes to cluster trajectories into continuous motion patterns and (2) hypothesis testing to identify discrete transitions in the data called transition points. The model iterativ…
Context-Aware Pedestrian Motion Prediction In Urban Intersections
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
本文提出了一种新的基于上下文的行人运动预测方法，在拥挤的城市交叉口，在类似的，但新的，环境预测的额外的灵活性。此前，陈等。等人组合了基于马尔可夫和基于聚类的方法来学习基于网格的世界中的运动基元，并随后通过将学习到的基元之间的过渡建模为高斯过程（GP）来预测行人轨迹。这项工作扩展了先前的方法，将语义特征从环境（相对距离路边和行人交通灯的状态）在GP制定更准确的预测行人轨迹在同一时间尺度。我们评估了使用MIT Mobility On Demand车队中的一辆车收集的真实数据的新方法。结果显示，预测精度提高了12.5%，曲线下面积（AUC）减少了2.65倍，曲线下面积（AUC）用作量化预测轨迹集的跨度的度量，使得较低的AUC对应于行人运动的未来方向的较高置信度。
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…
Prediction of human motions is key for safe navigation of autonomous robots among humans. In cluttered environments, several motion hypotheses may exist for a pedestrian, due to its interactions with the environment and other pedestrians. Previous works for estimating multiple motion hypotheses require a large number of samples which limits their applicability in real-time motion planning. In this paper, we present a variational learning approach for interaction-aware and multi-modal trajectory prediction based on deep generative neural networks. Our approach can achieve faster convergence and…
Pedestrian trajectory prediction is an essential task in robotic applications such as autonomous driving and robot navigation. State-of-the-art trajectory predictors use a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to encode observed trajectories and decode multi-modal future trajectories. This process can suffer from accumulated errors over long prediction horizons (>=2 seconds). This paper presents BiTraP, a goal-conditioned bi-directional multi-modal trajectory prediction method based on the CVAE. BiTraP estimates the goal (end-point) of trajectories an…
We propose a safe DRL approach for autonomous vehicle (AV) navigation through crowds of pedestrians while making a left turn at an unsignalized intersection. Our method uses two long-short term memory (LSTM) models that are trained to generate the perceived state of the environment and the future trajectories of pedestrians given noisy observations of their movement. A future collision prediction algorithm based on the future trajectories of the ego vehicle and pedestrians is used to mask unsafe actions if the system predicts a collision. The performance of our approach is evaluated in two exp…
University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学）；University of Technology Nuremberg（纽伦堡工业大学）
Robustly classifying ground infrastructure such as roads and street crossings is an essential task for mobile robots operating alongside pedestrians. While many semantic segmentation datasets are available for autonomous vehicles, models trained on such datasets exhibit a large domain gap when deployed on robots operating in pedestrian spaces. Manually annotating images recorded from pedestrian viewpoints is both expensive and time-consuming. To overcome this challenge, we propose TrackletMapper, a framework for annotating ground surface types such as sidewalks, roads, and street crossings fro…
Volkswagen Group（大众汽车集团）；Innovation Center California（加州创新中心）
Detecting and predicting the behavior of pedestrians is extremely crucial for self-driving vehicles to plan and interact with them safely. Although there have been several research works in this area, it is important to have fast and memory efficient models such that it can operate in embedded hardware in these autonomous machines. In this work, we propose a novel architecture using spatial-temporal multi-tasking to do camera based pedestrian detection and intention prediction. Our approach significantly reduces the latency by being able to detect and predict all pedestrians' intention in a si…
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…
Institute for Management Cybernetics, Aachen, Germany（亚琛管理控制论研究所）
This paper aims to explore the problem of trajectory prediction in heterogeneous pedestrian zones, where social dynamics representation is a big challenge. Proposed is an end-to-end learning framework for prediction accuracy improvement based on an attention mechanism to learn social interaction from multi-factor inputs.
Modeling the dynamics of people walking is a problem of long-standing interest in computer vision. Many previous works involving pedestrian trajectory prediction define a particular set of individual actions to implicitly model group actions. In this paper, we present a novel architecture named GP-Graph which has collective group representations for effective pedestrian trajectory prediction in crowded environments, and is compatible with all types of existing approaches. A key idea of GP-Graph is to model both individual-wise and group-wise relations as graph representations. To do this, GP-G…
Robotics Institute, University of Michigan（密歇根大学机器人研究所）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Pedestrians and drivers interact closely in a wide range of environments. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) correspondingly face the need to predict pedestrians' future trajectories in these same environments. Traditional model-based prediction methods have been limited to making predictions in highly structured scenes with signalized intersections, marked crosswalks, or curbs. Deep learning methods have instead leveraged datasets to learn predictive features that generalize across scenes, at the cost of model interpretability. This paper aims to achieve both widely applicable and interpretable predic…
Predicting pedestrian behavior is a crucial task for intelligent driving systems. Accurate predictions require a deep understanding of various contextual elements that potentially impact the way pedestrians behave. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework that relies on different data modalities to predict future trajectories and crossing actions of pedestrians from an ego-centric perspective. Specifically, our model utilizes a cross-modal Transformer architecture to capture dependencies between different data types. The output of the Transformer is augmented with representation…
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA（美国密歇根大学安娜堡分校机械工程系）
For safe navigation around pedestrians, automated vehicles (AVs) need to plan their motion by accurately predicting pedestrians trajectories over long time horizons. Current approaches to AV motion planning around crosswalks predict only for short time horizons (1-2 s) and are based on data from pedestrian interactions with human-driven vehicles (HDVs). In this paper, we develop a hybrid systems model that uses pedestrians gap acceptance behavior and constant velocity dynamics for long-term pedestrian trajectory prediction when interacting with AVs. Results demonstrate the applicability of the…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Massachusetts（马萨诸塞大学）
For automated vehicles (AVs) to reliably navigate through crosswalks, they need to understand pedestrians crossing behaviors. Simple and reliable pedestrian behavior models aid in real-time AV control by allowing the AVs to predict future pedestrian behaviors. In this paper, we present a Behavior aware Model Predictive Controller (B-MPC) for AVs that incorporates long-term predictions of pedestrian crossing behavior using a previously developed pedestrian crossing model. The model incorporates pedestrians gap acceptance behavior and utilizes minimal pedestrian information, namely their positio…
Pedestrian behavior prediction is one of the major challenges for intelligent driving systems in urban environments. Pedestrians often exhibit a wide range of behaviors and adequate interpretations of those depend on various sources of information such as pedestrian appearance, states of other road users, the environment layout, etc. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-modal prediction algorithm that incorporates different sources of information captured from the environment to predict future crossing actions of pedestrians. The proposed model benefits from a hybrid learning arch…
School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学机械工程学院）
In recent years, road safety has attracted significant attention from researchers and practitioners in the intelligent transport systems domain. As one of the most common and vulnerable groups of road users, pedestrians cause great concerns due to their unpredictable behavior and movement, as subtle misunderstandings in vehicle-pedestrian interaction can easily lead to risky situations or collisions. Existing methods use either predefined collision-based models or human-labeling approaches to estimate the pedestrians' risks. These approaches are usually limited by their poor generalization abi…
Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；University of Twente（特温特大学）；Clausthal University of Technology（克劳斯塔尔工业大学）
Predicting trajectories of pedestrians based on goal information in highly interactive scenes is a crucial step toward Intelligent Transportation Systems and Autonomous Driving. The challenges of this task come from two key sources: (1) complex social interactions in high pedestrian density scenarios and (2) limited utilization of goal information to effectively associate with past motion information. To address these difficulties, we integrate social forces into a Transformer-based stochastic generative model backbone and propose a new goal-based trajectory predictor called ForceFormer. Diffe…
Pedestrian behavior prediction is one of the major challenges for intelligent driving systems. Pedestrians often exhibit complex behaviors influenced by various contextual elements. To address this problem, we propose BiPed, a multitask learning framework that simultaneously predicts trajectories and actions of pedestrians by relying on multimodal data. Our method benefits from 1) a bifold encoding approach where different data modalities are processed independently allowing them to develop their own representations, and jointly to produce a representation for all modalities using shared param…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Multi-pedestrian trajectory prediction is an indispensable element of autonomous systems that safely interact with crowds in unstructured environments. Many recent efforts in trajectory prediction algorithms have focused on understanding social norms behind pedestrian motions. Yet we observe these works usually hold two assumptions, which prevent them from being smoothly applied to robot applications: (1) positions of all pedestrians are consistently tracked, and (2) the target agent pays attention to all pedestrians in the scene. The first assumption leads to biased interaction modeling with …
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
As autonomous systems begin to operate amongst humans, methods for safe interaction must be investigated. We consider an example of a small autonomous vehicle in a pedestrian zone that must safely maneuver around people in a free-form fashion. We investigate two key questions: How can we effectively integrate pedestrian intent estimation into our autonomous stack. Can we develop an online monitoring framework to give formal guarantees on the safety of such human-robot interactions. We present a pedestrian intent estimation framework that can accurately predict future pedestrian trajectories gi…
Understanding and predicting the intention of pedestrians is essential to enable autonomous vehicles and mobile robots to navigate crowds. This problem becomes increasingly complex when we consider the uncertainty and multimodality of pedestrian motion, as well as the implicit interactions between members of a crowd, including any response to a vehicle. Our approach, Probabilistic Crowd GAN, extends recent work in trajectory prediction, combining Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with Mixture Density Networks (MDNs) to output probabilistic multimodal predictions, from which likely modal paths a…
Knowledge-aware Graph Transformer for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction
Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech)（南方科技大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University（广东技术师范大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Predicting the behavior of road users, particularly pedestrians, is vital for safe motion planning in the context of autonomous driving systems. Traditionally, pedestrian behavior prediction has been realized in terms of forecasting future trajectories. However, recent evidence suggests that predicting higher-level actions, such as crossing the road, can help improve trajectory forecasting and planning tasks accordingly. There are a number of existing datasets that cater to the development of pedestrian action prediction algorithms, however, they lack certain characteristics, such as bird's ey…
Critical for the coexistence of humans and robots in dynamic environments is the capability for agents to understand each other's actions, and anticipate their movements. This paper presents Stochastic Process Anticipatory Navigation (SPAN), a framework that enables nonholonomic robots to navigate in environments with crowds, while anticipating and accounting for the motion patterns of pedestrians. To this end, we learn a predictive model to predict continuous-time stochastic processes to model future movement of pedestrians. Anticipated pedestrian positions are used to conduct chance constrai…
One of the major challenges for autonomous vehicles in urban environments is to understand and predict other road users' actions, in particular, pedestrians at the point of crossing. The common approach to solving this problem is to use the motion history of the agents to predict their future trajectories. However, pedestrians exhibit highly variable actions most of which cannot be understood without visual observation of the pedestrians themselves and their surroundings. To this end, we propose a solution for the problem of pedestrian action anticipation at the point of crossing. Our approach…
Smooth handling of pedestrian interactions is a key requirement for Autonomous Vehicles (AV) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Such systems call for early and accurate prediction of a pedestrian's crossing/not-crossing behaviour in front of the vehicle. Existing approaches to pedestrian behaviour prediction make use of pedestrian motion, his/her location in a scene and static context variables such as traffic lights, zebra crossings etc. We stress on the necessity of early prediction for smooth operation of such systems. We introduce the influence of vehicle interactions on pedest…
