Exploring Navigation Maps for Learning-Based Motion Prediction

Abstract: The prediction of surrounding agents' motion is a key for safe autonomous driving. In this paper, we explore navigation maps as an alternative to the predominant High Definition (HD) maps for learning-based motion prediction. Navigation maps provide topological and geometrical information on road-level, HD maps additionally have centimeter-accurate lane-level information. As a result, HD maps are costly and time-consuming to obtain, while navigation maps with near-global coverage are freely available. We describe an approach to integrate navigation maps into learning-based motion prediction models. To exploit locally available HD maps during training, we additionally propose a model-agnostic method for knowledge distillation. In experiments on the publicly available Argoverse dataset with navigation maps obtained from OpenStreetMap, our approach shows a significant improvement over not using a map at all. Combined with our method for knowledge distillation, we achieve results that are close to the original HD map-reliant models. Our publicly available navigation map API for Argoverse enables researchers to develop and evaluate their own approaches using navigation maps.