With growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments, the ability of such systems to perceive, understand, and anticipate human behavior becomes increasingly important. Specifically, predicting future positions of dynamic agents and planning considering such predictions are key tasks for self-driving vehicles, service robots, and advanced surveillance systems. This article provides a survey of human motion trajectory prediction. We review, analyze, and structure a large selection of work from different communities and propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods based on the motion modeling approach and level of contextual information used. We provide an overview of the existing datasets and performance metrics. We discuss limitations of the state of the art and outline directions for further research.

We present an ample description of a socially compliant mobile robotic platform, which is developed in the EU-funded project SPENCER. The purpose of this robot is to assist, inform and guide passengers in large and busy airports. One particular aim is to bring travellers of connecting flights conveniently and efficiently from their arrival gate to the passport control. The uniqueness of the project stems from the strong demand of service robots for this application with a large potential impact for the aviation industry on one side, and on the other side from the scientific advancements in social robotics, brought forward and achieved in SPENCER. The main contributions of SPENCER are novel methods to perceive, learn, and model human social behavior and to use this knowledge to plan appropriate actions in realtime for mobile platforms. In this paper, we describe how the project advances the fields of detection and tracking of individuals and groups, recognition of human social relations and activities, normative human behavior learning, socially-aware task and motion planning, learning socially annotated maps, and conducting empirical experiments to assess socio-psychological effects of normative robot behaviors.

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We present a mobile robot motion planning approach under kinodynamic constraints that exploits learned perception priors in the form of continuous Gaussian mixture fields. Our Gaussian mixture fields are statistical multi-modal motion models of discrete objects or continuous media in the environment that encode e.g. the dynamics of air or pedestrian flows. We approach this task using a recently proposed circular linear flow field map based on semi-wrapped GMMs whose mixture components guide sampling and rewiring in an RRT* algorithm using a steer function for non-holonomic mobile robots. In our experiments with three alternative baselines, we show that this combination allows the planner to very efficiently generate high-quality solutions in terms of path smoothness, path length as well as natural yet minimum control effort motions through multi-modal representations of Gaussian mixture fields.

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Accurate long-term prediction of human motion in populated spaces is an important but difficult task for mobile robots and intelligent vehicles. What makes this task challenging is that human motion is influenced by a large variety of factors including the person's intention, the presence, attributes, actions, social relations and social norms of other surrounding agents, and the geometry and semantics of the environment. In this paper, we consider the problem of computing human motion predictions that account for such factors. We formulate the task as an MDP planning problem with stochastic policies and propose a weighted random walk algorithm in which each agent is locally influenced by social forces from other nearby agents. The novelty of this paper is that we incorporate social grouping information into the prediction process reflecting the soft formation constraints that groups typically impose to their members' motion. We show that our method makes more accurate predictions than three state-of-the-art methods in terms of probabilistic and geometrical performance metrics.

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