LiRaNet: End-to-End Trajectory Prediction using Spatio-Temporal Radar Fusion

In this paper, we present LiRaNet, a novel end-to-end trajectory prediction method which utilizes radar sensor information along with widely used lidar and high definition (HD) maps. Automotive radar provides rich, complementary information, allowing for longer range vehicle detection as well as instantaneous radial velocity measurements. However, there are factors that make the fusion of lidar and radar information challenging, such as the relatively low angular resolution of radar measurements, their sparsity and the lack of exact time synchronization with lidar. To overcome these challenges, we propose an efficient spatio-temporal radar feature extraction scheme which achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple large-scale datasets.Further, by incorporating radar information, we show a 52% reduction in prediction error for objects with high acceleration and a 16% reduction in prediction error for objects at longer range.

MultiXNet: Multiclass Multistage Multimodal Motion Prediction

One of the critical pieces of the self-driving puzzle is understanding the surroundings of the self-driving vehicle (SDV) and predicting how these surroundings will change in the near future. To address this task we propose MultiXNet, an end-to-end approach for detection and motion prediction based directly on lidar sensor data. This approach builds on prior work by handling multiple classes of traffic actors, adding a jointly trained second-stage trajectory refinement step, and producing a multimodal probability distribution over future actor motion that includes both multiple discrete traffic behaviors and calibrated continuous uncertainties. The method was evaluated on a large-scale, real-world data set collected by a fleet of SDVs in several cities, with the results indicating that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.