  Long-term situation prediction plays a crucial role in the development of
intelligent vehicles. A major challenge still to overcome is the prediction of
complex downtown scenarios with multiple road users, e.g., pedestrians, bikes,
and motor vehicles, interacting with each other. This contribution tackles this
challenge by combining a Bayesian filtering technique for environment
representation, and machine learning as long-term predictor. More specifically,
a dynamic occupancy grid map is utilized as input to a deep convolutional
neural network. This yields the advantage of using spatially distributed
velocity estimates from a single time step for prediction, rather than a raw
data sequence, alleviating common problems dealing with input time series of
multiple sensors. Furthermore, convolutional neural networks have the inherent
characteristic of using context information, enabling the implicit modeling of
road user interaction. Pixel-wise balancing is applied in the loss function
counteracting the extreme imbalance between static and dynamic cells. One of
the major advantages is the unsupervised learning character due to fully
automatic label generation. The presented algorithm is trained and evaluated on
multiple hours of recorded sensor data and compared to Monte-Carlo simulation.

Robotics