  Most recent successes on forecasting the people motion are based on LSTM
models and all most recent progress has been achieved by modelling the social
interaction among people and the people interaction with the scene. We question
the use of the LSTM models and propose the novel use of Transformer Networks
for trajectory forecasting. This is a fundamental switch from the sequential
step-by-step processing of LSTMs to the only-attention-based memory mechanisms
of Transformers. In particular, we consider both the original Transformer
Network (TF) and the larger Bidirectional Transformer (BERT), state-of-the-art
on all natural language processing tasks. Our proposed Transformers predict the
trajectories of the individual people in the scene. These are "simple" model
because each person is modelled separately without any complex human-human nor
scene interaction terms. In particular, the TF model without bells and whistles
yields the best score on the largest and most challenging trajectory
forecasting benchmark of TrajNet. Additionally, its extension which predicts
multiple plausible future trajectories performs on par with more engineered
techniques on the 5 datasets of ETH + UCY. Finally, we show that Transformers
may deal with missing observations, as it may be the case with real sensor
data. Code is available at https://github.com/FGiuliari/Trajectory-Transformer.
