Pedestrian motion prediction evaluation for urban autonomous driving

TL;DR

This paper evaluates pedestrian motion prediction methods within real urban autonomous driving scenarios, highlighting the importance of integrating state-of-the-art solutions into existing systems and assessing their real-world performance.

Contribution

It provides a practical evaluation of open-source pedestrian motion prediction solutions integrated into Autoware Mini in real urban conditions, emphasizing real-world applicability.

Findings

Traditional metrics may not fully capture real-world performance.

Integration into existing frameworks reveals practical challenges.

Open-source solutions show varying effectiveness in natural environments.

Abstract

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.