Trajectory prediction of preceding target vehicles based on lane crossing and final points generation model considering driving styles

Reliable trajectory prediction of preceding target vehicles (PTVs) is crucial for the planning and decision making of automated vehicles. However, the future trajectory is affected by the driver's intention and diverse driving styles, which can hardly be predicted precisely, especially when the vehicle performs a lane change maneuver. In this study, we propose a lane crossing and final points generation (CFPG) model-based trajectory prediction approach for PTVs, in which the key influence factors such as the driver's intention and the mixed driving style are included. Firstly, we build a maneuver and stage recognition model upon the long short term memory (LSTM) to infer the current maneuver of the preceding target vehicle. Furthermore, the approach predicts the lane crossing point using a physics-based model combining with a deep conditional generative model trained by a deep neural network. Moreover, a maneuver-based model is adopted to predict the final point according to the prediction interval. In order to avoid the possible cumulative error caused by iteratively generating trajectories in traditional methods, we use a curve fitting method to obtain the predicted trajectory. Lane changing data collected from naturalistic driving scenarios are used to verify the proposed approach, and the results suggest more accurate and reliable prediction trajectories compared with conventional methods.