Multimodal vehicle trajectory prediction and integrated threat assessment algorithm based on adaptive driving intention

Abstract

As autonomous driving and connected communication technologies advance swiftly, vehicle trajectory prediction has become increasingly significant. The motion of a vehicle is contingent not only on its historical trajectory but is also subject to the influence of surrounding vehicles, thereby exhibiting intricate social and temporal interdependencies. Furthermore, the inherent randomness and uncertainty in driver behavior render vehicle trajectory prediction inherently multimodal, a factor that is frequently neglected in current research. Against this backdrop, a multimodal vehicle trajectory prediction (MTP) model based on an encoder-decoder architecture is proposed to hierarchically extract historical features of vehicles. The model consists of five key components: temporal feature encoder module, spatial interaction module, spatial-temporal dependence module, driving intention fusion module and multimodal trajectory output module. Experiments on the NGSIM dataset show that the predictive performance of the model has been improved to varying degrees, especially at 3–5 s, where the improvement is more significant. Compared with state-of-the-art models, the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) error at 5 s time horizon is 3.38 m on NGSIM dataset, which represents a 25 % improvement. To measure the safety of predicted trajectories, we propose a comprehensive threat assessment model that combines collision time (TTC), headway (TH) and time to lateral collision (TLC) metrics based on safe distance theory. This model not only evaluates the longitudinal collision threat in the following state, but also evaluates the lateral collision threat during driving maneuvers in multi lane scenarios, thereby comprehensively improving the safety of vehicle driving. This research also offers new perspectives and insights for the development of autonomous driving.