Interactive Vehicle Trajectory Prediction for Highways Based on a Graph Attention Mechanism

Precise trajectory prediction is pivotal for autonomous vehicles operating in real-world traffic conditions, and can help them make the right decisions to ensure safety on the road. However, state-of-the-art approaches consider limited information about the historical movements of vehicles. On highways, drivers make their next judgments according to the behavior of the ambient vehicles. Thus, vehicles need to consider temporal and spatial interactions to reduce the risk of future collisions. In the current work, a trajectory prediction method is put forward in accordance with a graph attention mechanism. We add the absolute and relative motion information of vehicles to the input of the model to describe the vehicles’ past motion states more accurately. LSTM models are employed to process the historical motion information of vehicles, as well as the temporal correlations in interactions. The graph attention mechanism is applied to capture the spatial correlations between vehicles. Utilizing a decoder rooted in an LSTM framework, the future trajectory distribution is generated. Evaluation on the NGSIM US-101 and I-80 datasets substantiates the superiority of our approach over existing state-of-the-art algorithms. Moreover, the predictions of our model are analyzed.