Uncertainty-aware Short-term Motion Prediction of Traffic Actors for Autonomous Driving

Despite its ubiquity in our daily lives, AI is only just starting to make advances in what may arguably have the largest societal impact thus far, the nascent field of autonomous driving. In this work we discuss this important topic and address one of crucial aspects of the emerging area, the problem of predicting future state of autonomous vehicle’s surrounding necessary for safe and efficient operations. We introduce a deep learning-based approach that takes into account current world state and produces rasterized representations of each actor’s vicinity. The raster images are then used by deep convolutional models to infer future movement of actors while accounting for inherent uncertainty of the prediction task. Extensive experiments on real-world data strongly suggest benefits of the proposed approach. Moreover, following successful tests the system was deployed to a fleet of autonomous vehicles.

Nemanja Djuric, Vladan Radosavljevic, Henggang Cui, Thi Nguyen, Fang-Chieh Chou, Tsung-Han Lin, Nitin Singh, Jeff Schneider

WACV 2020

‘Uncertainty-aware Short-term Motion Prediction of Traffic Actors for Autonomous Driving’ (PDF)

Uber ATG