Behavior-Aware Online Prediction of Obstacle Occupancy using Zonotopes

Abstract-- Predicting the motion of surrounding vehicles is key to safe autonomous driving, especially in unstructured environments without prior information. This paper proposes a novel online method to accurately predict the occupancy sets of surrounding vehicles based solely on motion observations. The approach is divided into two stages: first, an Extended Kalman Filter and a Linear Programming (LP) problem are used to estimate a compact zonotopic set of control actions; then, a reachability analysis propagates this set to predict future occupancy. The effectiveness of the method has been validated through simulations in an urban environment, showing accurate and compact predictions without relying on prior assumptions or prior training data. I. INTRODUCTION Autonomous driving has generated great research interests given the expected benefits, such as reducing accidents, optimizing traffic efficiency and energy management [1]. However, ensuring safety remains a major challenge, particularly in urban environments, where multiple agents interact dynamically [2].Predicting the motion of surrounding vehicles (SVs) is critical to designing safe motion planning and control strategies for autonomous vehicles.