10,16,2021

 Vehicle Trajectory Prediction by Transfer Learning of Semi-Supervised Models2020-07-13   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ In this work we show that semi-supervised models for vehicle trajectory prediction significantly improve performance over supervised models on state-of-the-art real-world benchmarks. Moving from supervised to semi-supervised models allows scaling-up by using unlabeled data, increasing the number of images in pre-training from Millions to a Billion. We perform ablation studies comparing transfer learning of semi-supervised and supervised models while keeping all other factors equal. Within semi-supervised models we compare contrastive learning with teacher-student methods as well as networks predicting a small number of trajectories with networks predicting probabilities over a large trajectory set. Our results using both low-level and mid-level representations of the driving environment demonstrate the applicability of semi-supervised methods for real-world vehicle trajectory prediction. TrajGAIL: Generating Urban Trajectories using Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning2020-07-28   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Recently, there are an abundant amount of urban vehicle trajectory data that is collected in the urban road networks. Many previous researches use different algorithms, especially based on machine learning, to analyze the patterns of the urban vehicle trajectories. Unlike previous researches which used discriminative modelling approach, this research suggests a generative modelling approach to learn the underlying distributions of the urban vehicle trajectory data. A generative model for urban vehicle trajectory can produce synthetic vehicle trajectories similar to the real vehicle trajectories. This model can be used for vehicle trajectory reproduction and private data masking in trajectory privacy issues. This research proposes \textit{TrajGAIL}; a generative adversarial imitation learning framework for urban vehicle trajectory generation. In TrajGAIL, the vehicle trajectory generation is formulated as an imitation learning problem in a partially observable Markov decision process. The model is trained by the generative adversarial framework which use the reward function from the adversarial discriminator. The model is tested with different datasets, and the performance of the model is evaluated in terms of dataset-level measures and trajectory-level measures. The proposed model showed exceptional performance compared to the baseline models. Multi-Head Attention based Probabilistic Vehicle Trajectory Prediction2020-07-04   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ This paper presents online-capable deep learning model for probabilistic vehicle trajectory prediction. We propose a simple encoder-decoder architecture based on multi-head attention. The proposed model generates the distribution of the predicted trajectories for multiple vehicles in parallel. Our approach to model the interactions can learn to attend to a few influential vehicles in an unsupervised manner, which can improve the interpretability of the network. The experiments using naturalistic trajectories at highway show the clear improvement in terms of positional error on both longitudinal and lateral direction. Attention-based Recurrent Neural Network for Urban Vehicle Trajectory Prediction2019-12-03   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ With the increasing deployment of diverse positioning devices and location-based services, a huge amount of spatial and temporal information has been collected and accumulated as trajectory data. Among many applications, trajectory-based location prediction is gaining increasing attention because of its potential to improve the performance of many applications in multiple domains. This research focuses on trajectory sequence prediction methods using trajectory data obtained from the vehicles in urban traffic network. As Recurrent Neural Network(RNN) model is previously proposed, we propose an improved method of Attention-based Recurrent Neural Network model(ARNN) for urban vehicle trajectory prediction. We introduce attention mechanism into urban vehicle trajectory prediction to explain the impact of network-level traffic state information. The model is evaluated using the Bluetooth data of private vehicles collected in Brisbane, Australia with 5 metrics which are widely used in the sequence modeling. The proposed ARNN model shows significant performance improvement compared to the existing RNN models considering not only the cells to be visited but also the alignment of the cells in sequence. Map-Adaptive Goal-Based Trajectory Prediction2020-09-09   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ We present a new method for multi-modal, long-term vehicle trajectory prediction. Our approach relies on using lane centerlines captured in rich maps of the environment to generate a set of proposed goal paths for each vehicle. Using these paths -- which are generated at run time and therefore dynamically adapt to the scene -- as spatial anchors, we predict a set of goal-based trajectories along with a categorical distribution over the goals. This approach allows us to directly model the goal-directed behavior of traffic actors, which unlocks the potential for more accurate long-term prediction. Our experimental results on both a large-scale internal driving dataset and on the public nuScenes dataset show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for vehicle trajectory prediction over a 6-second horizon. We also empirically demonstrate that our model is better able to generalize to road scenes from a completely new city than existing methods. CoverNet: Multimodal Behavior Prediction using Trajectory Sets2020-04-01   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ We present CoverNet, a new method for multimodal, probabilistic trajectory prediction for urban driving. Previous work has employed a variety of methods, including multimodal regression, occupancy maps, and 1-step stochastic policies. We instead frame the trajectory prediction problem as classification over a diverse set of trajectories. The size of this set remains manageable due to the limited number of distinct actions that can be taken over a reasonable prediction horizon. We structure the trajectory set to a) ensure a desired level of coverage of the state space, and b) eliminate physically impossible trajectories. By dynamically generating trajectory sets based on the agent's current state, we can further improve our method's efficiency. We demonstrate our approach on public, real-world self-driving datasets, and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Social-WaGDAT: Interaction-aware Trajectory Prediction via Wasserstein Graph Double-Attention Network2020-02-14   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Effective understanding of the environment and accurate trajectory prediction of surrounding dynamic obstacles are indispensable for intelligent mobile systems (like autonomous vehicles and social robots) to achieve safe and high-quality planning when they navigate in highly interactive and crowded scenarios. Due to the existence of frequent interactions and uncertainty in the scene evolution, it is desired for the prediction system to enable relational reasoning on different entities and provide a distribution of future trajectories for each agent. In this paper, we propose a generic generative neural system (called Social-WaGDAT) for multi-agent trajectory prediction, which makes a step forward to explicit interaction modeling by incorporating relational inductive biases with a dynamic graph representation and leverages both trajectory and scene context information. We also employ an efficient kinematic constraint layer applied to vehicle trajectory prediction which not only ensures physical feasibility but also enhances model performance. The proposed system is evaluated on three public benchmark datasets for trajectory prediction, where the agents cover pedestrians, cyclists and on-road vehicles. The experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves better performance than various baseline approaches in terms of prediction accuracy. GISNet: Graph-Based Information Sharing Network For Vehicle Trajectory Prediction2020-03-21   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ The trajectory prediction is a critical and challenging problem in the design of an autonomous driving system. Many AI-oriented companies, such as Google Waymo, Uber and DiDi, are investigating more accurate vehicle trajectory prediction algorithms. However, the prediction performance is governed by lots of entangled factors, such as the stochastic behaviors of surrounding vehicles, historical information of self-trajectory, and relative positions of neighbors, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based information sharing network (GISNet) that allows the information sharing between the target vehicle and its surrounding vehicles. Meanwhile, the model encodes the historical trajectory information of all the vehicles in the scene. Experiments are carried out on the public NGSIM US-101 and I-80 Dataset and the prediction performance is measured by the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). The quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that our model significantly improves the trajectory prediction accuracy, by up to 50.00%, compared to existing models. Learning Probabilistic Intersection Traffic Models for Trajectory Prediction2020-02-05   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Autonomous agents must be able to safely interact with other vehicles to integrate into urban environments. The safety of these agents is dependent on their ability to predict collisions with other vehicles' future trajectories for replanning and collision avoidance. The information needed to predict collisions can be learned from previously observed vehicle trajectories in a specific environment, generating a traffic model. The learned traffic model can then be incorporated as prior knowledge into any trajectory estimation method being used in this environment. This work presents a Gaussian process based probabilistic traffic model that is used to quantify vehicle behaviors in an intersection. The Gaussian process model provides estimates for the average vehicle trajectory, while also capturing the variance between the different paths a vehicle may take in the intersection. The method is demonstrated on a set of time-series position trajectories. These trajectories are reconstructed by removing object recognition errors and missed frames that may occur due to data source processing. To create the intersection traffic model, the reconstructed trajectories are clustered based on their source and destination lanes. For each cluster, a Gaussian process model is created to capture the average behavior and the variance of the cluster. To show the applicability of the Gaussian model, the test trajectories are classified with only partial observations. Performance is quantified by the number of observations required to correctly classify the vehicle trajectory. Both the intersection traffic modeling computations and the classification procedure are timed. These times are presented as results and demonstrate that the model can be constructed in a reasonable amount of time and the classification procedure can be used for online applications. A Scalable Framework for Trajectory Prediction2019-02-27   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Trajectory prediction (TP) is of great importance for a wide range of location-based applications in intelligent transport systems such as location-based advertising, route planning, traffic management, and early warning systems. In the last few years, the widespread use of GPS navigation systems and wireless communication technology enabled vehicles has resulted in huge volumes of trajectory data. The task of utilizing this data employing spatio-temporal techniques for trajectory prediction in an efficient and accurate manner is an ongoing research problem. Existing TP approaches are limited to short-term predictions. Moreover, they cannot handle a large volume of trajectory data for long-term prediction. To address these limitations, we propose a scalable clustering and Markov chain based hybrid framework, called Traj-clusiVAT-based TP, for both short-term and long-term trajectory prediction, which can handle a large number of overlapping trajectories in a dense road network. Traj-clusiVAT can also determine the number of clusters, which represent different movement behaviours in input trajectory data. In our experiments, we compare our proposed approach with a mixed Markov model (MMM)-based scheme, and a trajectory clustering, NETSCAN-based TP method for both short- and long-term trajectory predictions. We performed our experiments on two real, vehicle trajectory datasets, including a large-scale trajectory dataset consisting of 3.28 million trajectories obtained from 15,061 taxis in Singapore over a period of one month. Experimental results on two real trajectory datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms the existing approaches in terms of both short- and long-term prediction performances, based on prediction accuracy and distance error (in km). Intention-aware Long Horizon Trajectory Prediction of Surrounding Vehicles using Dual LSTM Networks2019-06-06   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ As autonomous vehicles (AVs) need to interact with other road users, it is of importance to comprehensively understand the dynamic traffic environment, especially the future possible trajectories of surrounding vehicles. This paper presents an algorithm for long-horizon trajectory prediction of surrounding vehicles using a dual long short term memory (LSTM) network, which is capable of effectively improving prediction accuracy in strongly interactive driving environments. In contrast to traditional approaches which require trajectory matching and manual feature selection, this method can automatically learn high-level spatial-temporal features of driver behaviors from naturalistic driving data through sequence learning. By employing two blocks of LSTMs, the proposed method feeds the sequential trajectory to the first LSTM for driver intention recognition as an intermediate indicator, which is immediately followed by a second LSTM for future trajectory prediction. Test results from real-world highway driving data show that the proposed method can, in comparison to state-of-art methods, output more accurate and reasonable estimate of different future trajectories over 5s time horizon with root mean square error (RMSE) for longitudinal and lateral prediction less than 5.77m and 0.49m, respectively. Sub-Goal Trees -- a Framework for Goal-Directed Trajectory Prediction and Optimization2019-06-12   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Many AI problems, in robotics and other domains, are goal-directed, essentially seeking a trajectory leading to some goal state. In such problems, the way we choose to represent a trajectory underlies algorithms for trajectory prediction and optimization. Interestingly, most all prior work in imitation and reinforcement learning builds on a sequential trajectory representation -- calculating the next state in the trajectory given its predecessors. We propose a different perspective: a goal-conditioned trajectory can be represented by first selecting an intermediate state between start and goal, partitioning the trajectory into two. Then, recursively, predicting intermediate points on each sub-segment, until a complete trajectory is obtained. We call this representation a sub-goal tree, and building on it, we develop new methods for trajectory prediction, learning, and optimization. We show that in a supervised learning setting, sub-goal trees better account for trajectory variability, and can predict trajectories exponentially faster at test time by leveraging a concurrent computation. Then, for optimization, we derive a new dynamic programming equation for sub-goal trees, and use it to develop new planning and reinforcement learning algorithms. These algorithms, which are not based on the standard Bellman equation, naturally account for hierarchical sub-goal structure in a task. Empirical results on motion planning domains show that the sub-goal tree framework significantly improves both accuracy and prediction time. Scalable Unsupervised Multi-Criteria Trajectory Segmentation and Driving Preference Mining2020-10-23   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ We present analysis techniques for large trajectory data sets that aim to provide a semantic understanding of trajectories reaching beyond them being point sequences in time and space. The presented techniques use a driving preference model w.r.t. road segment traversal costs, e.g., travel time and distance, to analyze and explain trajectories. In particular, we present trajectory mining techniques that can (a) find interesting points within a trajectory indicating, e.g., a via-point, and (b) recover the driving preferences of a driver based on their chosen trajectory. We evaluate our techniques on the tasks of via-point identification and personalized routing using a data set of more than 1 million vehicle trajectories collected throughout Denmark during a 3-year period. Our techniques can be implemented efficiently and are highly parallelizable, allowing them to scale to millions or billions of trajectories. Spatio-Temporal Graph Dual-Attention Network for Multi-Agent Prediction and Tracking2021-02-17   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ An effective understanding of the environment and accurate trajectory prediction of surrounding dynamic obstacles are indispensable for intelligent mobile systems (e.g. autonomous vehicles and social robots) to achieve safe and high-quality planning when they navigate in highly interactive and crowded scenarios. Due to the existence of frequent interactions and uncertainty in the scene evolution, it is desired for the prediction system to enable relational reasoning on different entities and provide a distribution of future trajectories for each agent. In this paper, we propose a generic generative neural system (called STG-DAT) for multi-agent trajectory prediction involving heterogeneous agents. The system takes a step forward to explicit interaction modeling by incorporating relational inductive biases with a dynamic graph representation and leverages both trajectory and scene context information. We also employ an efficient kinematic constraint layer applied to vehicle trajectory prediction. The constraint not only ensures physical feasibility but also enhances model performance. Moreover, the proposed prediction model can be easily adopted by multi-target tracking frameworks. The tracking accuracy proves to be improved by empirical results. The proposed system is evaluated on three public benchmark datasets for trajectory prediction, where the agents cover pedestrians, cyclists and on-road vehicles. The experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves better performance than various baseline approaches in terms of prediction and tracking accuracy. Kernel Trajectory Maps for Multi-Modal Probabilistic Motion Prediction2019-10-07   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Understanding the dynamics of an environment, such as the movement of humans and vehicles, is crucial for agents to achieve long-term autonomy in urban environments. This requires the development of methods to capture the multi-modal and probabilistic nature of motion patterns. We present Kernel Trajectory Maps (KTM) to capture the trajectories of movement in an environment. KTMs leverage the expressiveness of kernels from non-parametric modelling by projecting input trajectories onto a set of representative trajectories, to condition on a sequence of observed waypoint coordinates, and predict a multi-modal distribution over possible future trajectories. The output is a mixture of continuous stochastic processes, where each realisation is a continuous functional trajectory, which can be queried at arbitrarily fine time steps. Interplanetary Transfers via Deep Representations of the Optimal Policy and/or of the Value Function2019-04-18   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ A number of applications to interplanetary trajectories have been recently proposed based on deep networks. These approaches often rely on the availability of a large number of optimal trajectories to learn from. In this paper we introduce a new method to quickly create millions of optimal spacecraft trajectories from a single nominal trajectory. Apart from the generation of the nominal trajectory, no additional optimal control problems need to be solved as all the trajectories, by construction, satisfy Pontryagin's minimum principle and the relevant transversality conditions. We then consider deep feed forward neural networks and benchmark three learning methods on the created dataset: policy imitation, value function learning and value function gradient learning. Our results are shown for the case of the interplanetary trajectory optimization problem of reaching Venus orbit, with the nominal trajectory starting from the Earth. We find that both policy imitation and value function gradient learning are able to learn the optimal state feedback, while in the case of value function learning the optimal policy is not captured, only the final value of the optimal propellant mass is. It Is Not the Journey but the Destination: Endpoint Conditioned Trajectory Prediction2020-07-18   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Human trajectory forecasting with multiple socially interacting agents is of critical importance for autonomous navigation in human environments, e.g., for self-driving cars and social robots. In this work, we present Predicted Endpoint Conditioned Network (PECNet) for flexible human trajectory prediction. PECNet infers distant trajectory endpoints to assist in long-range multi-modal trajectory prediction. A novel non-local social pooling layer enables PECNet to infer diverse yet socially compliant trajectories. Additionally, we present a simple "truncation-trick" for improving few-shot multi-modal trajectory prediction performance. We show that PECNet improves state-of-the-art performance on the Stanford Drone trajectory prediction benchmark by ~20.9% and on the ETH/UCY benchmark by ~40.8%. Project homepage: https://karttikeya.github.io/publication/htf/ Variational Autoencoder Trajectory Primitives with Continuous and Discrete Latent Codes2019-12-09   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Imitation learning is an intuitive approach for teaching motion to robotic systems. Although previous studies have proposed various methods to model demonstrated movement primitives, one of the limitations of existing methods is that it is not trivial to modify their planned trajectory once the model is learned. The trajectory of a robotic manipulator is often high-dimensional, and it is not easy to tune the shape of the planned trajectory in an intuitive manner. We address this problem by learning the latent space of the robot trajectory. If the latent variable of the trajectories can be learned, it can be used to tune the trajectory in an intuitive manner even when the user is an expert. We propose a framework for modeling demonstrated trajectories with a neural network that learns the low-dimensional latent space. Our neural network structure is built on the variational autoencoder (VAE) with discrete and continuous latent variables. We extend the structure of the existing VAE to obtain the decoder that is conditioned on the goal position of the trajectory for generalization to different goal positions. To cope with requirement of the massive training data, we use a trajectory augmentation technique inspired by the data augmentation commonly used in the computer vision community. In the proposed framework, the latent variables that encodes the multiple types of trajectories are learned in an unsupervised manner. The learned decoder can be used as a motion planner in which the user can specify the goal position and the trajectory types by setting the latent variables. The experimental results show that our neural network can be trained using a limited number of demonstrated trajectories and that the interpretable latent representations can be learned. Trajectory Prediction using Equivariant Continuous Convolution2020-10-21   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Trajectory prediction is a critical part of many AI applications, for example, the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. However, current methods are prone to making inconsistent and physically unrealistic predictions. We leverage insights from fluid dynamics to overcome this limitation by considering internal symmetry in trajectories. We propose a novel model, Equivariant Continous COnvolution (ECCO) for improved trajectory prediction. ECCO uses rotationally-equivariant continuous convolutions to embed the symmetries of the system. On two real-world vehicle and pedestrian trajectory datasets, ECCO attains competitive accuracy with significantly fewer parameters. It is also more sample efficient, generalizing automatically from few data points in any orientation. Lastly, ECCO improves generalization with equivariance, resulting in more physically consistent predictions. Our method provides a fresh perspective towards increasing trust and transparency in deep learning models. SafeCritic: Collision-Aware Trajectory Prediction2019-10-15   ${\displaystyle \cong }$ Navigating complex urban environments safely is a key to realize fully autonomous systems. Predicting future locations of vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists, thus, has received a lot of attention in the recent years. While previous works have addressed modeling interactions with the static (obstacles) and dynamic (humans) environment agents, we address an important gap in trajectory prediction. We propose SafeCritic, a model that synergizes generative adversarial networks for generating multiple "real" trajectories with reinforcement learning to generate "safe" trajectories. The Discriminator evaluates the generated candidates on whether they are consistent with the observed inputs. The Critic network is environmentally aware to prune trajectories that are in collision or are in violation with the environment. The auto-encoding loss stabilizes training and prevents mode-collapse. We demonstrate results on two large scale data sets with a considerable improvement over state-of-the-art. We also show that the Critic is able to classify the safety of trajectories.