Kernel Trajectory Maps for Multi-Modal Probabilistic Motion Prediction

Understanding the dynamics of an environment, such as the movement of humans and vehicles, is crucial for agents to achieve long-term autonomy in urban environments. This requires the development of methods to capture the multimodal and probabilistic nature of motion patterns. We present kernel trajectory maps (KTM) to capture the trajectories of movement in an environment. KTMs leverage the expressiveness of kernels from non-parametric modelling by projecting input trajectories onto a set of representative trajectories, to condition on a sequence of observed waypoint coordinates, and predict a multi-modal distribution over possible future trajectories. The output is a mixture of continuous stochastic processes, where each realisation is a continuous functional trajectory, which can be queried at arbitrarily fine time steps.