A Hybrid Neural-Assisted Unscented Kalman Filter for Unmanned Ground Vehicle Navigation

Modern autonomous navigation for unmanned ground vehicles relies on different estimators to fuse inertial sensors and GNSS measurements. However, the constant noise covariance matrices often struggle to account for dynamic real-world conditions. In this work we propose a hybrid estimation framework that bridges classical state estimation foundations with modern deep learning approaches. Instead of altering the fundamental unscented Kalman filter equations, a dedicated deep neural network is developed to predict the process and measurement noise uncertainty directly from raw inertial and GNSS measurements. We present a sim2real approach, with training performed only on simulative data. In this manner, we offer perfect ground truth data and relieves the burden of extensive data recordings. To evaluate our proposed approach and examine its generalization capabilities, we employed a 160-minutes test set from three datasets each with different types of vehicles (off-road vehicle, passenger car, and mobile robot), inertial sensors, road surface, and environmental conditions. We demonstrate across the three datasets a position improvement of $12.7\%$ compared to the adaptive model-based approach. Thus, offering a scalable and a more robust solution for unmanned ground vehicles navigation tasks.

Model-Based and Neural-Aided Approaches for Dog Dead Reckoning

Modern canine applications span medical and service roles, while robotic legged dogs serve as autonomous platforms for high-risk industrial inspection, disaster response, and search and rescue operations. For both, accurate positioning remains a significant challenge due to the cumulative drift inherent in inertial sensing. To bridge this gap, we propose three algorithms for accurate positioning using only inertial sensors, collectively referred to as dog dead reckoning (DDR). To evaluate our approaches, we designed DogMotion, a wearable unit for canine data recording. Using DogMotion, we recorded a dataset of 13 minutes. Additionally, we utilized a robotic legged dog dataset with a duration of 116 minutes. Across the two distinct datasets we demonstrate that our neural-aided methods consistently outperform model-based approaches, achieving an absolute distance error of less than 10\%. Consequently, we provide a lightweight and low-cost positioning solution for both biological and legged robotic dogs. To support reproducibility, our codebase and associated datasets have been made publicly available.

Pure Inertial Navigation in Challenging Environments with Wheeled and Chassis Mounted Inertial Sensors

Autonomous vehicles and wheeled robots are widely used in many applications in both indoor and outdoor settings. In practical situations with limited GNSS signals or degraded lighting conditions, the navigation solution may rely only on inertial sensors and as result drift in time due to errors in the inertial measurement. In this work, we propose WiCHINS, a wheeled and chassis inertial navigation system by combining wheel-mounted-inertial sensors with a chassis-mounted inertial sensor for accurate pure inertial navigation. To that end, we derive a three-stage framework, each with a dedicated extended Kalman filter. This framework utilizes the benefits of each location (wheel/body) during the estimation process. To evaluate our proposed approach, we employed a dataset with five inertial measurement units with a total recording time of 228.6 minutes. We compare our approach with four other inertial baselines and demonstrate an average position error of 11.4m, which is $2.4\%$ of the average traveled distance, using two wheels and one body inertial measurement units. As a consequence, our proposed method enables robust navigation in challenging environments and helps bridge the pure-inertial performance gap.

WMINet: A Wheel-Mounted Inertial Learning Approach For Mobile-Robot Positioning

Autonomous mobile robots are widely used for navigation, transportation, and inspection tasks indoors and outdoors. In practical situations of limited satellite signals or poor lighting conditions, navigation depends only on inertial sensors. In such cases, the navigation solution rapidly drifts due to inertial measurement errors. In this work, we propose WMINet a wheel-mounted inertial deep learning approach to estimate the mobile robot's position based only on its inertial sensors. To that end, we merge two common practical methods to reduce inertial drift: a wheel-mounted approach and driving the mobile robot in periodic trajectories. Additionally, we enforce a wheelbase constraint to further improve positioning performance. To evaluate our proposed approach we recorded using the Rosbot-XL a wheel-mounted initial dataset totaling 190 minutes, which is made publicly available. Our approach demonstrated a 66\% improvement over state-of-the-art approaches. As a consequence, our approach enables navigation in challenging environments and bridges the pure inertial gap. This enables seamless robot navigation using only inertial sensors for short periods.