STPOTR: Simultaneous Human Trajectory and Pose Prediction Using a Non-Autoregressive Transformer for Robot Follow-Ahead

In this paper, we greatly expand the capability of robots to perform the follow-ahead task and variations of this task through development of a neural network model to predict future human motion from an observed human motion history. We propose a non-autoregressive transformer architecture to leverage its parallel nature for easier training and fast, accurate predictions at test time. The proposed architecture divides human motion prediction into two parts: 1) the human trajectory, which is the 3D positions of the hip joint over time, and 2) the human pose which is the 3D positions of all other joints over time with respect to a fixed hip joint. We propose to make the two predictions simultaneously, as the shared representation can improve the model performance. Therefore, the model consists of two sets of encoders and decoders. First, a multi-head attention module applied to encoder outputs improves human trajectory. Second, another multi-head self-attention module applied to encoder outputs concatenated with decoder outputs facilitates the learning of temporal dependencies. Our model is well-suited for robotic applications in terms of test accuracy and speed, and compares favorably with respect to state-of-the-art methods. We demonstrate the real-world applicability of our work via the Robot Follow-Ahead task, a challenging yet practical case study for our proposed model. The human motion predicted by our model enables the robot follow-ahead in scenarios that require taking detailed human motion into account such as sit-to-stand, stand-to-sit. It also enables simple control policies to trivially generalize to many different variations of human following, such as follow-beside. Our code and data are available at the following Github page: https://github.com/mmahdavian/STPOTR