AI-Aided Advancements in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Navigation

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have become indispensable for deep-sea exploration, spanning critical scientific research and commercial applications. The rapid attenuation of electromagnetic waves renders satellite radio signals unavailable, while the dynamic unpredictability of the marine environment presents formidable navigation challenges. This chapter explores recent advancements in AI-aided AUV positioning, specifically focusing on advanced sensor fusion architectures that integrate inertial navigation systems with Doppler velocity logs and cameras. Beyond traditional model-based filtering, we examine the transformative emergence of AI-driven learning approaches in enhancing inertial dead-reckoning tasks and adaptive fusion algorithms. By addressing these recent milestones, this chapter provides a comprehensive roadmap for achieving the high-precision navigation essential for autonomous underwater missions.

PiDR: Physics-Informed Inertial Dead Reckoning for Autonomous Platforms

A fundamental requirement for full autonomy is the ability to sustain accurate navigation in the absence of external data, such as GNSS signals or visual information. In these challenging environments, the platform must rely exclusively on inertial sensors, leading to pure inertial navigation. However, the inherent noise and other error terms of the inertial sensors in such real-world scenarios will cause the navigation solution to drift over time. Although conventional deep-learning models have emerged as a possible approach to inertial navigation, they are inherently black-box in nature. Furthermore, they struggle to learn effectively with limited supervised sensor data and often fail to preserve physical principles. To address these limitations, we propose PiDR, a physics-informed inertial dead-reckoning framework for autonomous platforms in situations of pure inertial navigation. PiDR offers transparency by explicitly integrating inertial navigation principles into the network training process through the physics-informed residual component. PiDR plays a crucial role in mitigating abrupt trajectory deviations even under limited or sparse supervision. We evaluated PiDR on real-world datasets collected by a mobile robot and an autonomous underwater vehicle. We obtained more than 29% positioning improvement in both datasets, demonstrating the ability of PiDR to generalize different platforms operating in various environments and dynamics. Thus, PiDR offers a robust, lightweight, yet effective architecture and can be deployed on resource-constrained platforms, enabling real-time pure inertial navigation in adverse scenarios.

A-PINN: Auxiliary Physics-informed Neural Networks for Structural Vibration Analysis in Continuous Euler-Bernoulli Beam

Recent advancements in physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their variants have garnered substantial focus from researchers due to their effectiveness in solving both forward and inverse problems governed by differential equations. In this research, a modified Auxiliary physics-informed neural network (A-PINN) framework with balanced adaptive optimizers is proposed for the analysis of structural vibration problems. In order to accurately represent structural systems, it is critical for capturing vibration phenomena and ensuring reliable predictive analysis. So, our investigations are crucial for gaining deeper insight into the robustness of scientific machine learning models for solving vibration problems. Further, to rigorously evaluate the performance of A-PINN, we conducted different numerical simulations to approximate the Euler-Bernoulli beam equations under the various scenarios. The numerical results substantiate the enhanced performance of our model in terms of both numerical stability and predictive accuracy. Our model shows improvement of at least 40% over the baselines.