Deep-Learning-Assisted Inertial Dead Reckoning and Fusion

The interest in mobile platforms across a variety of applications has increased significantly in recent years. One of the reasons is the ability to achieve accurate navigation using low-cost sensors. To this end, inertial sensors are fused with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals. GNSS outages during platform operation can result in pure inertial navigation, causing the navigation solution to drift. In such situations, periodic trajectories (PTSs) with dedicated algorithms were suggested to mitigate the drift. With periodic dynamics, inertial deep learning approaches can capture the motion more accurately and provide accurate dead reckoning for drones and mobile robots. In this article, we propose approaches to extend deep-learning-assisted inertial sensing and fusion capabilities during periodic motion. We begin by demonstrating that fusion between GNSS and inertial sensors in PTS achieves better accuracy compared with straight-line trajectories. Next, we propose an empowered network architecture to accurately regress the change in distance of the platform. Using this network, we drive a hybrid approach for a neural-inertial fusion filter. Finally, we use this approach for situations when GNSS is available and show its benefits. A dataset of 337 min of data collected from inertial sensors mounted on a mobile robot and a quadrotor is used to evaluate our approaches.