Haotian Shi

Keshu Wu, Yang Zhou, Haotian Shi et al.

Predicting vehicle trajectories is crucial for ensuring automated vehicle operation efficiency and safety, particularly on congested multi-lane highways. In such dynamic environments, a vehicle's motion is determined by its historical behaviors as well as interactions with surrounding vehicles. These intricate interactions arise from unpredictable motion patterns, leading to a wide range of driving behaviors that warrant in-depth investigation. This study presents the Graph-based Interaction-aware Multi-modal Trajectory Prediction (GIMTP) framework, designed to probabilistically predict future vehicle trajectories by effectively capturing these interactions. Within this framework, vehicles' motions are conceptualized as nodes in a time-varying graph, and the traffic interactions are represented by a dynamic adjacency matrix. To holistically capture both spatial and temporal dependencies embedded in this dynamic adjacency matrix, the methodology incorporates the Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network (DGCN), thereby providing a graph embedding of both historical states and future states. Furthermore, we employ a driving intention-specific feature fusion, enabling the adaptive integration of historical and future embeddings for enhanced intention recognition and trajectory prediction. This model gives two-dimensional predictions for each mode of longitudinal and lateral driving behaviors and offers probabilistic future paths with corresponding probabilities, addressing the challenges of complex vehicle interactions and multi-modality of driving behaviors. Validation using real-world trajectory datasets demonstrates the efficiency and potential.

Rui Gan, Haotian Shi, Pei Li et al.

Vehicle trajectory prediction plays a vital role in intelligent transportation systems and autonomous driving, as it significantly affects vehicle behavior planning and control, thereby influencing traffic safety and efficiency. Numerous studies have been conducted to predict short-term vehicle trajectories in the immediate future. However, long-term trajectory prediction remains a major challenge due to accumulated errors and uncertainties. Additionally, balancing accuracy with interpretability in the prediction is another challenging issue in predicting vehicle trajectory. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Goal-based Neural Physics Vehicle Trajectory Prediction Model (GNP). The GNP model simplifies vehicle trajectory prediction into a two-stage process: determining the vehicle's goal and then choosing the appropriate trajectory to reach this goal. The GNP model contains two sub-modules to achieve this process. The first sub-module employs a multi-head attention mechanism to accurately predict goals. The second sub-module integrates a deep learning model with a physics-based social force model to progressively predict the complete trajectory using the generated goals. The GNP demonstrates state-of-the-art long-term prediction accuracy compared to four baseline models. We provide interpretable visualization results to highlight the multi-modality and inherent nature of our neural physics framework. Additionally, ablation studies are performed to validate the effectiveness of our key designs.

Keke Long, Zihao Sheng, Haotian Shi et al.

In vehicle trajectory prediction, physics models and data-driven models are two predominant methodologies. However, each approach presents its own set of challenges: physics models fall short in predictability, while data-driven models lack interpretability. Addressing these identified shortcomings, this paper proposes a novel framework, the Physics-Enhanced Residual Learning (PERL) model. PERL integrates the strengths of physics-based and data-driven methods for traffic state prediction. PERL contains a physics model and a residual learning model. Its prediction is the sum of the physics model result and a predicted residual as a correction to it. It preserves the interpretability inherent to physics-based models and has reduced data requirements compared to data-driven methods. Experiments were conducted using a real-world vehicle trajectory dataset. We proposed a PERL model, with the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) as its physics car-following model and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) as its residual learning model. We compare this PERL model with the physics car-following model, data-driven model, and other physics-informed neural network (PINN) models. The result reveals that PERL achieves better prediction with a small dataset, compared to the physics model, data-driven model, and PINN model. Second, the PERL model showed faster convergence during training, offering comparable performance with fewer training samples than the data-driven model and PINN model. Sensitivity analysis also proves comparable performance of PERL using another residual learning model and a physics car-following model.

Keke Long, Haotian Shi, Yang Zhou et al.

Linear control models have gained extensive application in vehicle control due to their simplicity, ease of use, and support for stability analysis. However, these models lack adaptability to the changing environment and multi-objective settings. Reinforcement learning (RL) models, on the other hand, offer adaptability but suffer from a lack of interpretability and generalization capabilities. This paper aims to develop a family of RL-based controllers enhanced by physics-informed policies, leveraging the advantages of both physics-based models (data-efficient and interpretable) and RL methods (flexible to multiple objectives and fast computing). We propose the Physics-Enhanced Residual Policy Learning (PERPL) framework, where the physics component provides model interpretability and stability. The learning-based Residual Policy adjusts the physics-based policy to adapt to the changing environment, thereby refining the decisions of the physics model. We apply our proposed model to decentralized control to mixed traffic platoon of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) and Human-driven Vehicles (HVs) using a constant time gap (CTG) strategy for cruising and incorporating actuator and communication delays. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves smaller headway errors and better oscillation dampening than linear models and RL alone in scenarios with artificially extreme conditions and real preceding vehicle trajectories. At the macroscopic level, overall traffic oscillations are also reduced as the penetration rate of CAVs employing the PERPL scheme increases.

Zheng Li, Zhipeng Bao, Haoming Meng et al.

This paper presents the development of a comprehensive dataset capturing interactions between Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and traffic control devices, specifically traffic lights and stop signs. Derived from the Waymo Motion dataset, our work addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by providing real-world trajectory data on how AVs navigate these traffic control devices. We propose a methodology for identifying and extracting relevant interaction trajectory data from the Waymo Motion dataset, incorporating over 37,000 instances with traffic lights and 44,000 with stop signs. Our methodology includes defining rules to identify various interaction types, extracting trajectory data, and applying a wavelet-based denoising method to smooth the acceleration and speed profiles and eliminate anomalous values, thereby enhancing the trajectory quality. Quality assessment metrics indicate that trajectories obtained in this study have anomaly proportions in acceleration and jerk profiles reduced to near-zero levels across all interaction categories. By making this dataset publicly available, we aim to address the current gap in datasets containing AV interaction behaviors with traffic lights and signs. Based on the organized and published dataset, we can gain a more in-depth understanding of AVs' behavior when interacting with traffic lights and signs. This will facilitate research on AV integration into existing transportation infrastructures and networks, supporting the development of more accurate behavioral models and simulation tools.

Junwei You, Rui Gan, Weizhe Tang et al.

Vehicle trajectory prediction is crucial for advancing autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Although deep learning-based approaches - especially those utilizing transformer-based and generative models - have markedly improved prediction accuracy by capturing complex, non-linear patterns in vehicle dynamics and traffic interactions, they frequently overlook detailed car-following behaviors and the inter-vehicle interactions critical for real-world driving applications, particularly in fully autonomous or mixed traffic scenarios. To address the issue, this study introduces a scaled noise conditional diffusion model for car-following trajectory prediction, which integrates detailed inter-vehicular interactions and car-following dynamics into a generative framework, improving both the accuracy and plausibility of predicted trajectories. The model utilizes a novel pipeline to capture historical vehicle dynamics by scaling noise with encoded historical features within the diffusion process. Particularly, it employs a cross-attention-based transformer architecture to model intricate inter-vehicle dependencies, effectively guiding the denoising process and enhancing prediction accuracy. Experimental results on diverse real-world driving scenarios demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance and robustness of the proposed method.