No Arabic abstract
The task of strapdown inertial navigation system (SINS) initial alignment is to calculate the attitude transformation matrix from body frame to navigation frame. In this paper, such attitude transformation matrix is divided into two parts through introducing the initial inertially fixed navigation frame as inertial frame. The attitude changes of the navigation frame corresponding to the defined inertial frame can be exactly calculated with known velocity and position provided by GNSS. The attitude from body frame to the defined inertial frame is estimated based on the SINS mechanization in inertial frame. The attitude, velocity and position in inertial frame are formulated together as element of the group of double direct spatial isometries.It is proven that the group state model in inertial frame satisfies a particular group affine property and the corresponding error model satisfies a log linear autonomous differential equation on the Lie algebra. Based on such striking property, the attitude from body frame to the defined inertial frame can be estimated based on the linear error model with even extreme large misalignments. Two different error state vectors are extracted based on right and left matrix multiplications and the detailed linear state space models are derived based on the right and left errors for SINS mechanization in inertial frame. With the derived linear state space models, the explicit initial alignment procedures have been presented. Extensive simulation and field tests indicate that the initial alignment based on the left error model can perform quite well within a wide range of initial attitude errors, although the used filter is still a type of linear Kalman filter. This method is promising in practical products abandoning the traditional coarse alignment stage.
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.
This work deals with error models for trident quaternion framework proposed in the companion paper (Part I) and further uses them to investigate the odometer-aided static/in-motion inertial navigation attitude alignment for land vehicles. By linearizing the trident quaternion kinematic equation, the left and right trident quaternion error models are obtained, which are found to be equivalent to those derived from profound group affine. The two error models are used to design their corresponding extended Kalman filters (EKF), namely, the left-quaternion EKF (LQEKF) and the right-quaternion EKF (RQEKF). Simulations and field tests are conducted to evaluate their actual performances. Owing to the high estimation consistency, the L/RQEKF converge much faster in the static alignment than the traditional error model-based EKF, even under arbitrary large heading initialization. For the in-motion alignment, the L/RQEKF possess much larger convergence region than the traditional EKF does, although they still require the aid of attitude initialization so as to avoid large initial attitude errors.
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.
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.
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.