EgoNav: Egocentric Scene-aware Human Trajectory Prediction

Abstract: Wearable collaborative robots stand to assist human wearers who need fall prevention assistance or wear exoskeletons. Such a robot needs to be able to predict the ego motion of the wearer based on egocentric vision and the surrounding scene. In this work, we leveraged body-mounted cameras and sensors to anticipate the trajectory of human wearers through complex surroundings. To facilitate research in ego-motion prediction, we have collected a comprehensive walking scene navigation dataset centered on the user’s perspective. We present a method to predict human motion conditioning on the surrounding static scene. Our method leverages a diffusion model to produce a distribution of potential future trajectories, taking into account the user’s observation of the environment. We introduce a compact representation to encode the user’s visual memory of the surroundings, as well as an efficient sample-generating technique to speed up real-time inference of a diffusion model. We ablate our model and compare it to baselines, and results show that our model outperforms existing methods on key metrics of collision avoidance and trajectory mode coverage.

Authors: Weizhuo(Ken) Wang, C. Karen Liu, Monroe Kennedy III

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