LaneRCNN: Distributed Representations for Graph-Centric Motion Forecasting

Forecasting the future behaviors of dynamic actors is an important task in many robotics applications such as self-driving. It is extremely challenging as actors have latent intentions and their trajectories are governed by complex interactions between the other actors, themselves, and the map. In this paper, we propose LaneRCNN, a graph-centric motion forecasting model that captures the actor-to-actor and the actor-to-map relations in a distributed and structured manner. Relying on a specially designed graph encoder, we learn a local graph representation per actor (LaneRoI) to encode its past motions and the local map topology. We further develop an interaction module which permits efficient message passing among local graph representations within a shared global lane graph. Moreover, we parameterize the output trajectories based on lane graphs, a more amenable prediction parameterization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the challenging Argoverse [1] motion forecasting benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art performance.