Great GATsBi: Hybrid, Multimodal, Trajectory Forecasting for Bicycles using Anticipation Mechanism
This work addresses a critical safety gap for cyclists and autonomous systems by focusing on bicycle trajectory forecasting, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for other road users.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting bicycle trajectories, which is crucial for road safety but has been understudied compared to pedestrians and vehicles, by developing a hybrid framework that combines physics-based and social-based modeling, achieving state-of-the-art performance with improved short-term and long-term predictions.
Accurate prediction of road user movement is increasingly required by many applications ranging from advanced driver assistance systems to autonomous driving, and especially crucial for road safety. Even though most traffic accident fatalities account to bicycles, they have received little attention, as previous work focused mainly on pedestrians and motorized vehicles. In this work, we present the Great GATsBi, a domain-knowledge-based, hybrid, multimodal trajectory prediction framework for bicycles. The model incorporates both physics-based modeling (inspired by motorized vehicles) and social-based modeling (inspired by pedestrian movements) to explicitly account for the dual nature of bicycle movement. The social interactions are modeled with a graph attention network, and include decayed historical, but also anticipated, future trajectory data of a bicycles neighborhood, following recent insights from psychological and social studies. The results indicate that the proposed ensemble of physics models -- performing well in the short-term predictions -- and social models -- performing well in the long-term predictions -- exceeds state-of-the-art performance. We also conducted a controlled mass-cycling experiment to demonstrate the framework's performance when forecasting bicycle trajectories and modeling social interactions with road users.