Towards Proactive Navigation: A Pedestrian-Vehicle Cooperation Based Behavioral Model

Developing autonomous vehicles capable of navigating safely and socially around pedestrians is a major challenge in intelligent transportation. This challenge cannot be met without understanding pedestrians' behavioral response to an autonomous vehicle, and the task of building a clear and quantitative description of the pedestrian to vehicle interaction remains a key milestone in autonomous navigation research. As a step towards safe proactive navigation in a space shared with pedestrians, this work introduces a pedestrian-vehicle interaction behavioral model. The model estimates the pedestrian's cooperation with the vehicle in an interaction scenario by a quantitative time-varying function. Using this cooperation estimation the pedestrian's trajectory is predicted by a cooperation-based trajectory planning model. Both parts of the model are tested and validated using real-life recorded scenarios of pedestrian-vehicle interaction. The model is capable of describing and predicting agents' behaviors when interacting with a vehicle in both lateral and frontal crossing scenarios.