Project: #197 Perception for Transportation Service Robots Progress Report - Reporting Period Ending: Sept. 30, 2018 Principal Investigator: Aaron Steinfeld Status: Active Start Date: Jan. 1, 2018 End Date: June 30, 2019 Research Type: Applied Grant Type: Research Grant Program: FAST Act - Mobility National (2016 - 2022) Grant Cycle: 2018 Traffic21 Progress Report (Last Updated: Sept. 24, 2018, 8:45 a.m.) % Project Completed to Date: 20 % Grant Award Expended: 20 % Match Expended & Document: 0 USDOT Requirements Accomplishments Work during this reporting period focused on a multi-modal approach to human torso pose estimation and forecasting with a view towards lightweight computational and sensing needs for easy on-board deployment. We have made initial progress in this area. Our current end-to-end system combines RGB images and point cloud information to reason about 3D human pose. In addition to pose recovery, we have also made progress on forecasting torso pose. We evaluated the pose estimation and forecasting performance quantitatively using publicly available datasets (non-transportation settings). Our current forecasting algorithm outperforms complicated recurrent neural network methods, while also being faster on the torso pose forecasting task. This project is associated with the US DOT Accessible Transportation Technologies Research Initiative (ATTRI), specifically through the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) funded Disability Rehabilitation Research Project (DRRP) on Robotics and Automation for Inclusive Transportation. Discoveries and software developed under this award will flow into DRRP out-year efforts. Impacts Steinfeld has been active in larger US DOT ATTRI outreach efforts. This includes briefing the audience at the 2018 NIDILRR/USDOT Accessible Transportation Symposium and serving on the “Understanding User Needs, Accessible Design, and Deployment Challenges to Maximize AV Benefits,” panel at the 2018 Automated Vehicles Symposium (San Francisco). These presentations were in coordination with US DOT ATTRI personnel. Other We have submitted a paper based on this work for peer review at a competitive conference. Outcomes New Partners None Issues None