Learning Long-Term Situation Prediction For Automated Driving

A major challenge in autonomous driving is the prediction of complex downtown scenarios with mutiple road users. This contribution tackles this challenge by combining a Bayesian filtering technique for environment representation and machine learning as long-term predictor. Therefore, a dynamic occupancy grid map representing the static and dynamic environment around the ego-vehicle is utilized as input to a deep convolutional neural network. This yields the advantage of using data from a single timestamp for prediction, rather than an entire time series. Furthermore, convolutional neural networks have the inherent characteristic of using context information, enabling the implicit modeling of road user interaction. One of the major advantages is the unsupervised learning character due to fully automatic label generation. The presented algorithm is trained and evaluated on multiple hours of recorded sensor data containing multiple road users, e.g., pedestrians, bikes and vehicles.