Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Trajectory Prediction via a Single Inference from a Single Model

In the domain of autonomous driving, trajectory prediction plays a pivotal role in ensuring the safety and reliability of autonomous systems, especially when navigating complex environments. Unfortunately, trajectory prediction suffers from uncertainty problems due to the randomness inherent in the driving environment, but uncertainty quantification in trajectory prediction is not widely addressed, and most studies rely on deep ensembles methods. This study presents a novel uncertainty-aware multimodal trajectory prediction (UAMTP) model that quantifies aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties through a single forward inference. Our approach employs deterministic single forward pass methods, optimizing computational efficiency while retaining robust prediction accuracy. By decomposing trajectory prediction into velocity and yaw components and quantifying uncertainty in both, the UAMTP model generates multimodal predictions that account for environmental randomness and intention ambiguity. Evaluation on datasets collected by CARLA simulator demonstrates that our model not only outperforms Deep Ensembles-based multimodal trajectory prediction method in terms of accuracy such as minFDE and miss rate metrics but also offers enhanced time to react for collision avoidance scenarios. This research marks a step forward in integrating efficient uncertainty quantification into multimodal trajectory prediction tasks within resource-constrained autonomous driving platforms.