Probabilistic long-term prediction for autonomous vehicles

Long-term prediction of traffic participants is crucial to enable autonomous driving on public roads. The quality of the prediction directly affects the frequency of trajectory planning. With a poor estimation of the future development, more computational effort has to be put in re-planning, and a safe vehicle state at the end of the planning horizon is not guaranteed. A holistic probabilistic prediction, considering inputs, results and parameters as random variables, highly reduces the problem. A time frame of several seconds requires a probabilistic description of the scene evolution, where uncertainty or accuracy is represented by the trajectory distribution. Following this strategy, a novel evaluation method is needed, coping with the fact, that the future evolution of a scene is also uncertain. We present a method to evaluate the probabilistic prediction of real traffic scenes with varying start conditions. The proposed prediction is based on a particle filter, estimating behavior describing parameters of a microscopic traffic model. Experiments on real traffic data with random leading vehicles show the applicability in terms of convergence, enabling long-term prediction using forward propagation.