Physics Constrained Motion Prediction with Uncertainty Quantification

Abstract: Predicting the motion of dynamic agents is a critical task for guaranteeing the safety of autonomous systems. A particular challenge is that motion prediction algorithms should obey dynamics constraints and quantify prediction uncertainty as a measure of confidence. We present a physics-constrained approach for motion prediction which uses a surrogate dynamical model to ensure that predicted trajectories are dynamically feasible. We propose a two-step integration consisting of intent and trajectory prediction subject to dynamics constraints. We also construct prediction regions that quantify uncertainty and are tailored for autonomous driving by using conformal prediction, a popular statistical tool. Physics Constrained Motion Prediction achieves a 41% better ADE, 56% better FDE, and 19% better IoU over a baseline in experiments using an autonomous racing dataset.