LookOut: Diverse Multi-Future Prediction and Planning for Self-Driving

Self-driving vehicles need to anticipate a diverse set of future traffic scenarios in order to safely share the road with other traffic participants that may exhibit rare but dangerous driving. In this paper, we present LookOut, an approach to jointly perceive the environment and predict a diverse set of futures from sensor data, estimate their probability, and optimize a contingency plan over these diverse future realizations. In particular, we learn a diverse joint distribution over multi-agent future trajectories in a traffic scene that allows us to cover a wide range of future modes with high sample efficiency while leveraging the expressive power of generative models. Unlike previous work in diverse motion forecasting, our diversity objective explicitly rewards sampling future scenarios that require distinct reactions from the self-driving vehicle for improved safety. Our contingency planner then finds comfortable trajectories that ensure safe reactions to a wide range of future scenarios. Through extensive evaluations, we show that our model demonstrates significantly more diverse and sample-efficient motion forecasting in a large-scale self-driving dataset as well as safer and more comfortable motion plans in long-term closed-loop simulations than current state-of-the-art models

Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey

With growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments, the ability of such systems to perceive, understand and anticipate human behavior becomes increasingly important. Specifically, predicting future positions of dynamic agents and planning considering such predictions are key tasks for self-driving vehicles, service robots and advanced surveillance systems. This paper provides a survey of human motion trajectory prediction. We review, analyze and structure a large selection of work from different communities and propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods based on the motion modeling approach and level of contextual information used. We provide an overview of the existing datasets and performance metrics. We discuss limitations of the state of the art and outline directions for further research.Comment: Submitted to the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 37 page

Bridging the Gap Between Multi-Step and One-Shot Trajectory Prediction via Self-Supervision

Accurate vehicle trajectory prediction is an unsolved problem in autonomous driving with various open research questions. State-of-the-art approaches regress trajectories either in a one-shot or step-wise manner. Although one-shot approaches are usually preferred for their simplicity, they relinquish powerful self-supervision schemes that can be constructed by chaining multiple time-steps. We address this issue by proposing a middle-ground where multiple trajectory segments are chained together. Our proposed Multi-Branch Self-Supervised Predictor receives additional training on new predictions starting at intermediate future segments. In addition, the model 'imagines' the latent context and 'predicts the past' while combining multi-modal trajectories in a tree-like manner. We deliberately keep aspects such as interaction and environment modeling simplistic and nevertheless achieve competitive results on the INTERACTION dataset. Furthermore, we investigate the sparsely explored uncertainty estimation of deterministic predictors. We find positive correlations between the prediction error and two proposed metrics, which might pave way for determining prediction confidence.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, to be published in 34th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV

From Prediction to Planning With Goal Conditioned Lane Graph Traversals

The field of motion prediction for automated driving has seen tremendous progress recently, bearing ever-more mighty neural network architectures. Leveraging these powerful models bears great potential for the closely related planning task. In this letter we propose a novel goal-conditioning method and show its potential to transform a state-of-the-art prediction model into a goal-directed planner. Our key insight is that conditioning prediction on a navigation goal at the behaviour level outperforms other widely adopted methods, with the additional benefit of increased model interpretability. We train our model on a large open-source dataset and show promising performance in a comprehensive benchmark