RINS-W: Robust Inertial Navigation System on Wheels

Martin Brossard (1) , Axel Barrau (2) , Silvere Bonnabel (1)

1 CAOR - Centre de Robotique
2 Safran Tech

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.

Mots clés: deep learning; invariant extended Kalman filter; inertial navigation; autonomous vehicle; inertial odometry

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique; Robotique [cs.RO]

Martin Brossard, Axel Barrau, Silvere Bonnabel. RINS-W: Robust Inertial Navigation System on Wheels. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Nov 2019, Macao, China. ⟨hal-02057117v1⟩