Social relation and physical lane aggregator: Integrating social and physical features for multimodal motion prediction

Purpose - The purpose of this paper aims to model interaction relationship of traffic agents for motion prediction, which is critical for autonomous driving. It is obvious that traffic agents' trajectories are influenced by physical lane rules and agents' social interactions. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper, the authors propose the social relation and physical lane aggregator for multimodal motion prediction, where the social relations of agents are mainly captured with graph convolutional networks and self-attention mechanism and then fused with the physical lane via the self-attention mechanism. Findings - The proposed methods are evaluated on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed two feature aggregation modules for trajectory prediction. Originality/value - This paper proposes a new design method to extract traffic interactions, and the attention mechanism is used in each part of the model to extract and fuse different relational features, which is different from other methods and improves the accuracy of the LSTM-based trajectory prediction method.