arXiv subjects

Björn Olofsson

Publications and source records attributed to Björn Olofsson.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Towards Intent-Aware Human-Robot Teaming: A Platform for Search-and-Rescue Operations

We investigate the challenges of enabling effective collaboration between human operators and heterogeneous autonomous agents in complex, dynamic environments by developing an interaction platform that allows study of operator behavior and supports intent inference and decision-making using state-of-the-art frameworks. We demonstrate the extent to which the operator's perception, decisions, and actions could be supported by autonomous systems during search-and-rescue operations with our platform.

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arXiv2026

Unveiling Transferability in Trajectory Prediction via Latent Scene Embeddings

The growing availability of trajectory datasets has fueled major advances in data-driven motion prediction. Yet, models trained on one dataset often fail to generalize beyond their training domain as a result of differences in scene layouts, agent behaviors, and sensing conditions. A framework that learns latent representations of datasets and quantifies their similarity using distributional metrics is presented. This large-scale study covers 24 major datasets, including the most widely used motion-prediction benchmarks, and shows that the resulting transferability scores strongly correlate with cross-dataset model performance. The results provide practical guidance for dataset selection, pretraining, and large-scale foundation models for motion prediction, paving the way toward more generalizable and robust predictive systems.

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arXiv2025

Toward Unified Practices in Trajectory Prediction Research on Bird's-Eye-View Datasets

The availability of high-quality datasets is crucial for the development of behavior prediction algorithms in autonomous vehicles. This paper highlights the need to standardize the use of certain datasets for motion forecasting research to simplify comparative analysis and proposes a set of tools and practices to achieve this. Drawing on extensive experience and a comprehensive review of current literature, we summarize our proposals for preprocessing, visualization, and evaluation in the form of an open-sourced toolbox designed for researchers working on trajectory prediction problems. The clear specification of necessary preprocessing steps and evaluation metrics is intended to alleviate development efforts and facilitate the comparison of results across different studies. The toolbox is available at: https://github.com/westny/dronalize.

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arXiv2025

Robust Predictive Motion Planning by Learning Obstacle Uncertainty

Safe motion planning for robotic systems in dynamic environments is nontrivial in the presence of uncertain obstacles, where estimation of obstacle uncertainties is crucial in predicting future motions of dynamic obstacles. The worst-case characterization gives a conservative uncertainty prediction and may result in infeasible motion planning for the ego robotic system. In this paper, an efficient, robust, and safe motion-planing algorithm is developed by learning the obstacle uncertainties online. More specifically, the unknown yet intended control set of obstacles is efficiently computed by solving a linear programming problem. The learned control set is used to compute forward reachable sets of obstacles that are less conservative than the worst-case prediction. Based on the forward prediction, a robust model predictive controller is designed to compute a safe reference trajectory for the ego robotic system that remains outside the reachable sets of obstacles over the prediction horizon. The method is applied to a car-like mobile robot in both simulations and hardware experiments to demonstrate its effectiveness.

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arXiv2024

Uncertainty-Aware Decision-Making and Planning for Autonomous Forced Merging

In this paper, we develop an uncertainty-aware decision-making and motion-planning method for an autonomous ego vehicle in forced merging scenarios, considering the motion uncertainty of surrounding vehicles. The method dynamically captures the uncertainty of surrounding vehicles by online estimation of their acceleration bounds, enabling a reactive but rapid understanding of the uncertainty characteristics of the surrounding vehicles. By leveraging these estimated bounds, a non-conservative forward occupancy of surrounding vehicles is predicted over a horizon, which is incorporated in both the decision-making process and the motion-planning strategy, to enhance the resilience and safety of the planned reference trajectory. The method successfully fulfills the tasks in challenging forced merging scenarios, and the properties are illustrated by comparison with several alternative approaches.

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arXiv2024

Diffusion-Based Environment-Aware Trajectory Prediction

The ability to predict the future trajectories of traffic participants is crucial for the safe and efficient operation of autonomous vehicles. In this paper, a diffusion-based generative model for multi-agent trajectory prediction is proposed. The model is capable of capturing the complex interactions between traffic participants and the environment, accurately learning the multimodal nature of the data. The effectiveness of the approach is assessed on large-scale datasets of real-world traffic scenarios, showing that our model outperforms several well-established methods in terms of prediction accuracy. By the incorporation of differential motion constraints on the model output, we illustrate that our model is capable of generating a diverse set of realistic future trajectories. Through the use of an interaction-aware guidance signal, we further demonstrate that the model can be adapted to predict the behavior of less cooperative agents, emphasizing its practical applicability under uncertain traffic conditions.

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arXiv2023

MTP-GO: Graph-Based Probabilistic Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction with Neural ODEs

Enabling resilient autonomous motion planning requires robust predictions of surrounding road users' future behavior. In response to this need and the associated challenges, we introduce our model titled MTP-GO. The model encodes the scene using temporal graph neural networks to produce the inputs to an underlying motion model. The motion model is implemented using neural ordinary differential equations where the state-transition functions are learned with the rest of the model. Multimodal probabilistic predictions are obtained by combining the concept of mixture density networks and Kalman filtering. The results illustrate the predictive capabilities of the proposed model across various data sets, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods on a number of metrics.

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arXiv2023

Uncertainties in Robust Planning and Control of Autonomous Tractor-Trailer Vehicles

To study the effects of uncertainty in autonomous motion planning and control, an 8-DOF model of a tractor-semitrailer is implemented and analyzed. The implications of uncertainties in the model are then quantified and presented using sensitivity analysis and closed-loop simulations. The analysis reveals that the significance of various model parameters varies depending on the specific scenario under investigation. By using sampling-based closed-loop predictions, uncertainty bounds on state variable trajectories are determined. Our findings suggest the potential for the inclusion of our method within a robust predictive controller or as a driver-assistance system for rollover or lane departure warnings.

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arXiv2023

Interaction-Aware Motion Planning for Autonomous Vehicles with Multi-Modal Obstacle Uncertainty Predictions

This paper proposes an interaction and safety-aware motion-planning method for an autonomous vehicle in uncertain multi-vehicle traffic environments. The method integrates the ability of the interaction-aware interacting multiple model Kalman filter (IAIMM-KF) to predict interactive multi-modal maneuvers of surrounding vehicles, and the advantage of model predictive control (MPC) in planning an optimal trajectory in uncertain dynamic environments. The multi-modal prediction uncertainties, containing both the maneuver and trajectory uncertainties of surrounding vehicles, are considered in computing the reference targets and designing the collision-avoidance constraints of MPC for resilient motion planning of the ego vehicle. The MPC achieves safety awareness by incorporating a tunable parameter to adjust the predicted obstacle occupancy in the design of the safety constraints, allowing the approach to achieve a trade-off between performance and robustness. Based on the prediction of the surrounding vehicles, an optimal reference trajectory of the ego vehicle is computed by MPC to follow the time-varying reference targets and avoid collisions with obstacles. The efficiency of the method is illustrated in challenging highway-driving simulation scenarios and a driving scenario from a recorded traffic dataset.

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arXiv2023

Distributionally Robust RRT with Risk Allocation

An integration of distributionally robust risk allocation into sampling-based motion planning algorithms for robots operating in uncertain environments is proposed. We perform non-uniform risk allocation by decomposing the distributionally robust joint risk constraints defined over the entire planning horizon into individual risk constraints given the total risk budget. Specifically, the deterministic tightening defined using the individual risk constraints is leveraged to define our proposed exact risk allocation procedure. Our idea of embedding the risk allocation technique into sampling based motion planning algorithms realises guaranteed conservative, yet increasingly more risk feasible trajectories for efficient state space exploration.

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arXiv2023

Evaluation of Differentially Constrained Motion Models for Graph-Based Trajectory Prediction

Given their flexibility and encouraging performance, deep-learning models are becoming standard for motion prediction in autonomous driving. However, with great flexibility comes a lack of interpretability and possible violations of physical constraints. Accompanying these data-driven methods with differentially-constrained motion models to provide physically feasible trajectories is a promising future direction. The foundation for this work is a previously introduced graph-neural-network-based model, MTP-GO. The neural network learns to compute the inputs to an underlying motion model to provide physically feasible trajectories. This research investigates the performance of various motion models in combination with numerical solvers for the prediction task. The study shows that simpler models, such as low-order integrator models, are preferred over more complex, e.g., kinematic models, to achieve accurate predictions. Further, the numerical solver can have a substantial impact on performance, advising against commonly used first-order methods like Euler forward. Instead, a second-order method like Heun's can greatly improve predictions.

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arXiv2022

Resilient Branching MPC for Multi-Vehicle Traffic Scenarios Using Adversarial Disturbance Sequences

An approach to resilient planning and control of autonomous vehicles in multi-vehicle traffic scenarios is proposed. The proposed method is based on model predictive control (MPC), where alternative predictions of the surrounding traffic are determined automatically such that they are intentionally adversarial to the ego vehicle. This provides robustness against the inherent uncertainty in traffic predictions. To reduce conservatism, an assumption that other agents are of no ill intent is formalized. Simulation results from highway driving scenarios show that the proposed method in real-time negotiates traffic situations out of scope for a nominal MPC approach and performs favorably to state-of-the-art reinforcement-learning approaches without requiring prior training. The results also show that the proposed method performs effectively, with the ability to prune disturbance sequences with a lower risk for the ego vehicle.

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arXiv2021

Vehicle Behavior Prediction and Generalization Using Imbalanced Learning Techniques

The use of learning-based methods for vehicle behavior prediction is a promising research topic. However, many publicly available data sets suffer from class distribution skews which limits learning performance if not addressed. This paper proposes an interaction-aware prediction model consisting of an LSTM autoencoder and SVM classifier. Additionally, an imbalanced learning technique, the multiclass balancing ensemble is proposed. Evaluations show that the method enhances model performance, resulting in improved classification accuracy. Good generalization properties of learned models are important and therefore a generalization study is done where models are evaluated on unseen traffic data with dissimilar traffic behavior stemming from different road configurations. This is realized by using two distinct highway traffic recordings, the publicly available NGSIM US-101 and I80 data sets. Moreover, methods for encoding structural and static features into the learning process for improved generalization are evaluated. The resulting methods show substantial improvements in classification as well as generalization performance.

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