Use of Social Interaction and Intention to Improve Motion Prediction Within Automated Vehicle Framework: A Review

Human errors contribute to 94%(±2.2%) of road crashes resulting in fatal/non-fatal causalities, vehicle damages and a predicament in the pathway to safer road systems. Automated Vehicles (AVs) have been a potential attempt in lowering the crash rate by replacing human drivers with an advanced computer-aided decision-making approach. However, AVs are yet to progress in handling the unprecedented situations involving interactions with other road users. This raises a need for a sophisticated and robust methodological framework to predict human driver interaction and intention. It is of prime importance to develop a constructive knowledge on the existing literature for a proficient forward leap in the field. To address this, we aim to conduct a comprehensive review on motion prediction methods in automated driving context with a special emphasis on model-based and data-driven approaches. Over a hundred studies related to the motion prediction for AVs have been extensively reviewed. This study recommends that the field requires more intricate classification of motion prediction methods, as the conventional three-level categorisation scheme should be upgraded to a profound and present-day context. Therefore, we attempt to provide a clear categorisation of existing motion prediction solutions by adopting four principal strategies: 1. Prediction methods, 2. Classes, 3. Algorithms and 4. Datasets. An all-inclusive summary of the reviewed studies with their respective pros and cons are also presented. Furthermore, we summarise the standard evaluation metrics applied for road users’ intention estimation and trajectory prediction tasks. It is found that the recent studies are built upon multi-agent learning systems with interaction among multiple road users in the same road environment. These methods can provide reliable prediction performance in highly interactive situations over long periods of time. However, the limitation could be at the cost of higher computational complexity in comparison to conventional methods, which are simpler to design and computationally effective. It is also observed that the conventional methods can only operate over a narrow prediction horizon and seldom consider the interactions among the road users. This review contributes to knowledge in validation, addresses the discrepancies, to explicate the ambiguities and to streamline current research for a futuristic perspective beneficiary in motion prediction field.