Probabilistic Modeling of Vehicle Acceleration and State Propagation With Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks

The success of Intelligent Driver Assistance (IDA) depends on the system's ability to accurately model the state of traffic surrounding the ego vehicle and predict driving behavior of the surrounding vehicles in order to help the ego driver make the best informed decisions in real-time. The ability to predict acceleration behavior is crucial as a first step towards modeling traffic patterns. In this paper, we show that Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks are capable of producing acceleration distributions from which accurate future acceleration values can be sampled. Furthermore, state values calculated from these acceleration predictions are used as input for future predictions, showing that these networks are capable of generating realistic simulated vehicle trajectories over short prediction horizons.