No Arabic abstract
Imaging sonars have shown better flexibility than optical cameras in underwater localization and navigation for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). However, the sparsity of underwater acoustic features and the loss of elevation angle in sonar frames have imposed degeneracy cases, namely under-constrained or unobservable cases according to optimization-based or EKF-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). In these cases, the relative ambiguous sensor poses and landmarks cannot be triangulated. To handle this, this paper proposes a robust imaging sonar SLAM approach based on sonar keyframes (KFs) and an elastic sliding window. The degeneracy cases are further analyzed and the triangulation property of 2D landmarks in arbitrary motion has been proved. These degeneracy cases are discriminated and the sonar KFs are selected via saliency criteria to extract and save the informative constraints from previous sonar measurements. Incorporating the inertial measurements, an elastic sliding windowed back-end optimization is proposed to mostly utilize the past salient sonar frames and also restrain the optimization scale. Comparative experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its robustness to outliers from the wrong data association, even without loop closure.
This paper proposes a real-time approach for long-term inertial navigation based only on an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for self-localizing wheeled robots. The approach builds upon two components: 1) a robust detector that uses recurrent deep neural networks to dynamically detect a variety of situations of interest, such as zero velocity or no lateral slip; and 2) a state-of-the-art Kalman filter which incorporates this knowledge as pseudo-measurements for localization. Evaluations on a publicly available car dataset demonstrates that the proposed scheme may achieve a final precision of 20 m for a 21 km long trajectory of a vehicle driving for over an hour, equipped with an IMU of moderate precision (the gyro drift rate is 10 deg/h). To our knowledge, this is the first paper which combines sophisticated deep learning techniques with state-of-the-art filtering methods for pure inertial navigation on wheeled vehicles and as such opens up for novel data-driven inertial navigation techniques. Moreover, albeit taylored for IMU-only based localization, our method may be used as a component for self-localization of wheeled robots equipped with a more complete sensor suite.
Visual Localization is an essential component in autonomous navigation. Existing approaches are either based on the visual structure from SLAM/SfM or the geometric structure from dense mapping. To take the advantages of both, in this work, we present a complete visual inertial localization system based on a hybrid map representation to reduce the computational cost and increase the positioning accuracy. Specially, we propose two modules for data association and batch optimization, respectively. To this end, we develop an efficient data association module to associate map components with local features, which takes only $2$ms to generate temporal landmarks. For batch optimization, instead of using visual factors, we develop a module to estimate a pose prior from the instant localization results to constrain poses. The experimental results on the EuRoC MAV dataset demonstrate a competitive performance compared to the state of the arts. Specially, our system achieves an average position error in 1.7 cm with 100% recall. The timings show that the proposed modules reduce the computational cost by 20-30%. We will make our implementation open source at http://github.com/hyhuang1995/gmmloc.
Modern inertial measurements units (IMUs) are small, cheap, energy efficient, and widely employed in smart devices and mobile robots. Exploiting inertial data for accurate and reliable pedestrian navigation supports is a key component for emerging Internet-of-Things applications and services. Recently, there has been a growing interest in applying deep neural networks (DNNs) to motion sensing and location estimation. However, the lack of sufficient labelled data for training and evaluating architecture benchmarks has limited the adoption of DNNs in IMU-based tasks. In this paper, we present and release the Oxford Inertial Odometry Dataset (OxIOD), a first-of-its-kind public dataset for deep learning based inertial navigation research, with fine-grained ground-truth on all sequences. Furthermore, to enable more efficient inference at the edge, we propose a novel lightweight framework to learn and reconstruct pedestrian trajectories from raw IMU data. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our dataset and methods in achieving accurate data-driven pedestrian inertial navigation on resource-constrained devices.
This paper presents a vision-based modularized drone racing navigation system that uses a customized convolutional neural network (CNN) for the perception module to produce high-level navigation commands and then leverages a state-of-the-art planner and controller to generate low-level control commands, thus exploiting the advantages of both data-based and model-based approaches. Unlike the state-of-the-art method which only takes the current camera image as the CNN input, we further add the latest three drone states as part of the inputs. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method in various track layouts and offers two switchable navigation behaviors with a single trained network. The CNN-based perception module is trained to imitate an expert policy that automatically generates ground truth navigation commands based on the pre-computed global trajectories. Owing to the extensive randomization and our modified dataset aggregation (DAgger) policy during data collection, our navigation system, which is purely trained in simulation with synthetic textures, successfully operates in environments with randomly-chosen photorealistic textures without further fine-tuning.
In this paper, the optimization-based alignment (OBA) methods are investigated with main focus on the vector observations construction procedures for the strapdown inertial navigation system (SINS). The contributions of this study are twofold. First the OBA method is extended to be able to estimate the gyroscopes biases coupled with the attitude based on the construction process of the existing OBA methods. This extension transforms the initial alignment into an attitude estimation problem which can be solved using the nonlinear filtering algorithms. The second contribution is the comprehensive evaluation of the OBA methods and their extensions with different vector observations construction procedures in terms of convergent speed and steady-state estimate using field test data collected from different grades of SINS. This study is expected to facilitate the selection of appropriate OBA methods for different grade SINS.