  This paper reports on a data-driven, interaction-aware motion prediction
approach for pedestrians in environments cluttered with static obstacles. When
navigating in such workspaces shared with humans, robots need accurate motion
predictions of the surrounding pedestrians. Human navigation behavior is mostly
influenced by their surrounding pedestrians and by the static obstacles in
their vicinity. In this paper we introduce a new model based on Long-Short Term
Memory (LSTM) neural networks, which is able to learn human motion behavior
from demonstrated data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
approach using LSTMs, that incorporates both static obstacles and surrounding
pedestrians for trajectory forecasting. As part of the model, we introduce a
new way of encoding surrounding pedestrians based on a 1d-grid in polar angle
space. We evaluate the benefit of interaction-aware motion prediction and the
added value of incorporating static obstacles on both simulation and real-world
datasets by comparing with state-of-the-art approaches. The results show, that
our new approach outperforms the other approaches while being very
computationally efficient and that taking into account static obstacles for
motion predictions significantly improves the prediction accuracy, especially
in cluttered environments.
