Intent prediction of vulnerable road users for trusted autonomous vehicles

This study investigated how future autonomous vehicles could be further trusted by vulnerable road users (such as pedestrians and cyclists) that they would be interacting with in urban traffic environments. It focused on understanding the behaviours of such road users on a deeper level by predicting their future intentions based solely on vehicle-based sensors and AI techniques. The findings showed that personal/body language attributes of vulnerable road users besides their past motion trajectories and physics attributes in the environment led to more accurate predictions about their intended actions

Detection of Distracted Pedestrians using Convolutional Neural Networks

The risk of pedestrian accidents has increased due to the distracted walking increase. The research in the autonomous vehicles industry aims to minimize this risk by enhancing the route planning to produce safer routes. Detecting distracted pedestrians plays a significant role in identifying safer routes and hence decreases pedestrian accident risk. Thus, this research aims to investigate how to use the convolutional neural networks for building an algorithm that significantly improves the accuracy of detecting distracted pedestrians based on gathered cues. Particularly, this research involves the analysis of pedestrian’ images to identify distracted pedestrians who are not paying attention when crossing the road. This work tested three different architectures of convolutional neural networks. These architectures are Basic, Deep, and AlexNet. The performance of the three architectures was evaluated based on two datasets. The first is a new training dataset called SCIT and created by this work based on recorded videos of volunteers from Sheridan College Institute of Technology. The second is a public dataset called PETA, which was made up of images with various resolutions. The ConvNet model with the Deep architecture outperformed the Basic and AlexNet architectures in detecting distracted pedestrians

Data Driven Prediction Architecture for Autonomous Driving and its Application on Apollo Platform

Autonomous Driving vehicles (ADV) are on road with large scales. For safe and efficient operations, ADVs must be able to predict the future states and iterative with road entities in complex, real-world driving scenarios. How to migrate a well-trained prediction model from one geo-fenced area to another is essential in scaling the ADV operation and is difficult most of the time since the terrains, traffic rules, entities distributions, driving/walking patterns would be largely different in different geo-fenced operation areas. In this paper, we introduce a highly automated learning-based prediction model pipeline, which has been deployed on Baidu Apollo self-driving platform, to support different prediction learning sub-modules' data annotation, feature extraction, model training/tuning and deployment. This pipeline is completely automatic without any human intervention and shows an up to 400\% efficiency increase in parameter tuning, when deployed at scale in different scenarios across nations.Comment: Accepted by the 31st IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (2020