Assessing present intentions of an actor perceived by an autonomous vehicle

Abstract

Methods of forecasting intentions of actors that an autonomous vehicle (AV) encounters in are disclosed. The AV uses the intentions to improve its ability to predict trajectories for the actors, and accordingly making decisions about its own trajectories to avoid conflict with the actors. To do this, for any given actor the AV determines a class of the actor and detects an action that the actor is taking. The system uses the class and action to identify candidate intentions of the actor and evaluating a likelihood of each candidate intention. The system repeats this process over multiple cycles to determine overall probabilities for each of the candidate intentions. The AV's motion planning system can use the probabilities to determine likely trajectories of the actor, and accordingly influence the trajectory that the AV will itself follow in the environment.