Robots That Can See: Leveraging Human Pose for Trajectory Prediction
This work addresses safe robot navigation in human-centric spaces, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Transformer-based methods with added features.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting human trajectories in dynamic environments like homes and offices to improve robot navigation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks and reducing error in scenarios with limited historical data by leveraging 3D skeletal poses.
Anticipating the motion of all humans in dynamic environments such as homes and offices is critical to enable safe and effective robot navigation. Such spaces remain challenging as humans do not follow strict rules of motion and there are often multiple occluded entry points such as corners and doors that create opportunities for sudden encounters. In this work, we present a Transformer based architecture to predict human future trajectories in human-centric environments from input features including human positions, head orientations, and 3D skeletal keypoints from onboard in-the-wild sensory information. The resulting model captures the inherent uncertainty for future human trajectory prediction and achieves state-of-the-art performance on common prediction benchmarks and a human tracking dataset captured from a mobile robot adapted for the prediction task. Furthermore, we identify new agents with limited historical data as a major contributor to error and demonstrate the complementary nature of 3D skeletal poses in reducing prediction error in such challenging scenarios.