CMU Researchers, Argo AI Predict Future With Lidar Data

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Argo AI Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research developed a system to use lidar data to visualize not just where other moving objects are on the roads now, but also where they are likely to be in a few seconds. This method enables autonomous vehicles (AVs) to better plan for the motions of cars, pedestrians and other moving objects around it. Using the moving object's current position, velocity and trajectory, their method, FutureDet, creates several possible future paths in lidar, ranks them by the confidence it has that the moving object will follow the predicted path, and shows all these paths to the AV as if they were occurring in real-time. FutureDet then sees how the AV plans to respond to each path. "This method basically takes in lidar measurements and spits out the possible future locations of objects," said Deva Ramanan, a professor in the School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute, head of the Argo AI Center, an Argo principal scientist and the supervising researcher on the paper.