Pedestrian motion prediction evaluation for urban autonomous driving
This work addresses the gap in real-world integration and evaluation of state-of-the-art pedestrian motion prediction for autonomous driving engineers, though it is incremental as it focuses on assessment rather than new methods.
The study tackled the problem of evaluating pedestrian motion prediction methods in real-world urban autonomous driving conditions, finding that traditional metrics may not fully capture performance in natural settings, with experiments conducted in Tartu, Estonia.
Pedestrian motion prediction is a key part of the modular-based autonomous driving pipeline, ensuring safe, accurate, and timely awareness of human agents' possible future trajectories. The autonomous vehicle can use this information to prevent any possible accidents and create a comfortable and pleasant driving experience for the passengers and pedestrians. A wealth of research was done on the topic from the authors of robotics, computer vision, intelligent transportation systems, and other fields. However, a relatively unexplored angle is the integration of the state-of-art solutions into existing autonomous driving stacks and evaluating them in real-life conditions rather than sanitized datasets. We analyze selected publications with provided open-source solutions and provide a perspective obtained by integrating them into existing Autonomous Driving framework - Autoware Mini and performing experiments in natural urban conditions in Tartu, Estonia to determine valuability of traditional motion prediction metrics. This perspective should be valuable to any potential autonomous driving or robotics engineer looking for the real-world performance of the existing state-of-art pedestrian motion prediction problem. The code with instructions on accessing the dataset is available at https://github.com/dmytrozabolotnii/autoware_mini.