PORCA: Modeling and Planning for Autonomous Driving among Many Pedestrians
This addresses the challenge of safe navigation for autonomous vehicles in high-density urban environments, representing a domain-specific incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of autonomous driving in dense pedestrian crowds by developing a planning system that combines a pedestrian motion prediction model (PORCA) with a POMDP algorithm to handle uncertainty in pedestrian intentions, resulting in safe, efficient, and smooth driving in crowds with densities up to nearly one person per square meter.
This paper presents a planning system for autonomous driving among many pedestrians. A key ingredient of our approach is PORCA, a pedestrian motion prediction model that accounts for both a pedestrian's global navigation intention and local interactions with the vehicle and other pedestrians. Unfortunately, the autonomous vehicle does not know the pedestrian's intention a priori and requires a planning algorithm that hedges against the uncertainty in pedestrian intentions. Our planning system combines a POMDP algorithm with the pedestrian motion model and runs in near real time. Experiments show that it enables a robot vehicle to drive safely, efficiently, and smoothly among a crowd with a density of nearly one person per square meter.