Model-based Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction using Environmental Sensor for Mobile Robots Navigation

Safety is the most important to the mobile robots that coexist with human. There are many studies that investigate obstacle detection and collision avoidance by predicting obstacles’ trajectories several seconds into the future using mounted sensors such as cameras and laser range finder (LRF) for the safe behavior control of robots. In environments such as crossing roads where blind areas occur because of visual barriers like walls, obstacle detection might be delayed and collisions might be difficult to avoid. Using environmental sensors to detect obstacles is effective in such environments. When crossing roads, there are several passages pedestrian might move and it is difficult to depict going each passage in the same movement model. Therefore, we hypothesize that a more effective way to predict pedestrian movement is by predicting passages pedestrian might move and estimating the trajectories to the passages. We acquire pedestrian trajectory data using an environmental LRF with an extended Kalman filter (EKF) and construct pedestrian movement models using vector auto regressive (VAR) models, which pedestrian state is consisting of the position, speed and direction. Then, we test the validity of the constructed pedestrian movement models using experimental data. We narrow down the selection of a pedestrian movement model by comparing the prediction error for each path between the estimated pedestrian state using an EKF, and the predicted state using each movement model. We predict the trajectory using the selected movement model. Finally, we confirm that an appropriate path model that a pedestrian can actually move through is selected before the crossing area and that only the appropriate model is selected near the crossing area. Keywords—Prediction of Human Movement; Service Robots; Vector Auto Regressive Models; Kalman Filter; Collision Avoidance