Great GATsBi: Hybrid, Multimodal, Trajectory Forecasting for Bicycles using Anticipation Mechanism

TL;DR

Great GATsBi is a hybrid, multimodal trajectory prediction framework for bicycles that combines physics-based and social-based modeling, leveraging graph attention networks and anticipation mechanisms to improve short-term and long-term forecasting accuracy.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel hybrid model that integrates physics and social modeling for bicycle trajectory prediction, incorporating anticipation of future trajectories using graph attention networks.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art in bicycle trajectory prediction

Effective in short-term and long-term predictions

Validated through controlled mass-cycling experiments

Abstract

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.