Graph-based Trajectory Prediction with Cooperative Information

For automated driving, predicting the future trajectories of other road users in complex traffic situations is a hard problem. Modern neural networks use the past trajectories of traffic participants as well as map data to gather hints about the possible driver intention and likely maneuvers. With increasing connectivity between cars and other traffic actors, cooperative information is another source of data that can be used as inputs for trajectory prediction algorithms. Connected actors might transmit their intended path or even complete planned trajectories to other actors, which simplifies the prediction problem due to the imposed constraints. In this work, we outline the benefits of using this source of data for trajectory prediction and propose a graph-based neural network architecture that can leverage this additional data. We show that the network performance increases substantially if cooperative data is present. Also, our proposed training scheme improves the network's performance even for cases where no cooperative information is available. We also show that the network can deal with inaccurate cooperative data, which allows it to be used in real automated driving environments.