  Anticipating the motion of other road users is crucial for automated driving
systems (ADS), as it enables safe and informed downstream decision-making and
motion planning. Unfortunately, contemporary learning-based approaches for
motion prediction exhibit significant performance degradation as the prediction
horizon increases or the observation window decreases. This paper proposes a
novel technique for trajectory prediction that combines a data-driven
learning-based method with a velocity vector field (VVF) generated from a
nature-inspired concept, i.e., fluid flow dynamics. In this work, the vector
field is incorporated as an additional input to a convolutional-recurrent deep
neural network to help predict the most likely future trajectories given a
sequence of bird's eye view scene representations. The performance of the
proposed model is compared with state-of-the-art methods on the HighD dataset
demonstrating that the VVF inclusion improves the prediction accuracy for both
short and long-term (5~sec) time horizons. It is also shown that the accuracy
remains consistent with decreasing observation windows which alleviates the
requirement of a long history of past observations for accurate trajectory
prediction. Source codes are available at:
https://github.com/Amir-Samadi/VVF-TP.
