Multimodal Hybrid Pedestrian: A Hybrid Automaton Model of Urban Pedestrian Behavior for Automated Driving Applications

For automated vehicles (AVs) to navigate safely, they must be able to anticipate and predict the behavior of pedestrians. This is particularly critical in urban driving environments where risks of collisions are high. However, a major challenge is that pedestrian behavior is inherently multimodal in nature, i.e., pedestrians can plausibly take multiple paths. This is because, in large part, pedestrian behaviors are driven by unique intentions and decisions made by each pedestrian walking along a particular sidewalk or crosswalk. As described in this paper, we developed a hybrid automaton model of multimodal pedestrian behavior called Multimodal Hybrid Pedestrian (MHP). We account for multimodal pedestrian behavior by identifying pedestrian decision-making points and developing decision-making models to predict pedestrian behaviors in a probabilistic hybrid automaton framework. The resulting MHP model is more likely to predict the ground truth trajectory compared to two baseline models—a baseline hybrid automaton model and a constant velocity model. The MHP model is applicable to a wide variety of urban scenarios—midblocks, intersections, one-way, and two-way streets, etc., and the probabilistic predictions from the model can be utilized for AV motion planning.