Modeling and Prediction of Pedestrian Behavior based on the Sub-goal Concept

This study addresses a method to predict pedestrians' long term behavior in order to enable a robot to provide them services. In order to do that we want to be able to predict their final goal and the trajectory they will follow to reach it. We attain this task borrowing from human science studies the concept of sub-goals, defined as points and landmarks of the environment towards which pedestrians walk or where they take directional choices before reaching the final destination. We retrieve the position of these sub-goals from the analysis of a large set of pedestrian trajectories in a shopping mall, and model their global behavior through transition probabilities between sub-goals. The method allows us to predict the future position of pedestrians on the basis of the observation of their trajectory up to the moment.