NeurIT: Pushing the Limit of Neural Inertial Tracking for Indoor Robotic IoT

Inertial tracking is vital for robotic IoT and has gained popularity thanks to the ubiquity of low-cost Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and deep learning-powered tracking algorithms. Existing works, however, have not fully utilized IMU measurements, particularly magnetometers, nor maximized the potential of deep learning to achieve the desired accuracy. To enhance the tracking accuracy for indoor robotic applications, we introduce NeurIT, a sequence-to-sequence framework that elevates tracking accuracy to a new level. NeurIT employs a Time-Frequency Block-recurrent Transformer (TF-BRT) at its core, combining the power of recurrent neural network (RNN) and Transformer to learn representative features in both time and frequency domains. To fully utilize IMU information, we strategically employ body-frame differentiation of the magnetometer, which considerably reduces the tracking error. NeurIT is implemented on a customized robotic platform and evaluated in various indoor environments. Experimental results demonstrate that NeurIT achieves a mere 1-meter tracking error over a 300-meter distance. Notably, it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 48.21% on unseen data. NeurIT also performs comparably to the visual-inertial approach (Tango Phone) in vision-favored conditions and surpasses it in plain environments. We believe NeurIT takes an important step forward toward practical neural inertial tracking for ubiquitous and scalable tracking of robotic things. NeurIT, including the source code and the dataset, is open-sourced here: https://github.com/NeurIT-Project/NeurIT.

Are You Being Tracked? Discover the Power of Zero-Shot Trajectory Tracing with LLMs!

There is a burgeoning discussion around the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in acting as fundamental components that can be seamlessly incorporated into Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) to interpret complex trajectories. This study introduces LLMTrack, a model that illustrates how LLMs can be leveraged for Zero-Shot Trajectory Recognition by employing a novel single-prompt technique that combines role-play and think step-by-step methodologies with unprocessed Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. We evaluate the model using real-world datasets designed to challenge it with distinct trajectories characterized by indoor and outdoor scenarios. In both test scenarios, LLMTrack not only meets but exceeds the performance benchmarks set by traditional machine learning approaches and even contemporary state-of-the-art deep learning models, all without the requirement of training on specialized datasets. The results of our research suggest that, with strategically designed prompts, LLMs can tap into their extensive knowledge base and are well-equipped to analyze raw sensor data with remarkable effectiveness.

HARGPT: Are LLMs Zero-Shot Human Activity Recognizers?

There is an ongoing debate regarding the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) as foundational models seamlessly integrated with Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) for interpreting the physical world. In this paper, we carry out a case study to answer the following question: Are LLMs capable of zero-shot human activity recognition (HAR). Our study, HARGPT, presents an affirmative answer by demonstrating that LLMs can comprehend raw IMU data and perform HAR tasks in a zero-shot manner, with only appropriate prompts. HARGPT inputs raw IMU data into LLMs and utilizes the role-play and think step-by-step strategies for prompting. We benchmark HARGPT on GPT4 using two public datasets of different inter-class similarities and compare various baselines both based on traditional machine learning and state-of-the-art deep classification models. Remarkably, LLMs successfully recognize human activities from raw IMU data and consistently outperform all the baselines on both datasets. Our findings indicate that by effective prompting, LLMs can interpret raw IMU data based on their knowledge base, possessing a promising potential to analyze raw sensor data of the physical world effectively.

Robust Target Detection of Intelligent Integrated Optical Camera and mmWave Radar System

Target detection is pivotal for modern urban computing applications. While image-based techniques are widely adopted, they falter under challenging environmental conditions such as adverse weather, poor lighting, and occlusion. To improve the target detection performance under complex real-world scenarios, this paper proposes an intelligent integrated optical camera and millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar system. Utilizing both physical knowledge and data-driven methods, a long-term robust radar-camera fusion algorithm is proposed to solve the heterogeneous data fusion problem for detection improvement. For the occlusion scenarios, the proposed algorithm can effectively detect occluded targets with the help of memory through performing long-term detection. For dark scenarios with low-light conditions, the proposed algorithm can effectively mark the target in the dark picture as well as provide rough stickman imaging. The above two innovative functions of the hybrid optical camera and mmWave radar system are tested in real-world scenarios. The results demonstrate the robustness and significant enhancement in the target detection performance of our integrated system.

Enhancing Deep Learning Performance of Massive MIMO CSI Feedback

CSI feedback is an important problem of Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology because the feedback overhead is proportional to the number of sub-channels and the number of antennas, both of which scale with the size of the Massive MIMO system. Deep learning-based CSI feedback methods have been widely adopted recently owing to their superior performance. Despite the success, current approaches have not fully exploited the relationship between the characteristics of CSI data and the deep learning framework. In this paper, we propose a jigsaw puzzles aided training strategy (JPTS) to enhance the deep learning-based Massive MIMO CSI feedback approaches by maximizing mutual information between the original CSI and the compressed CSI. We apply JPTS on top of existing state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that by adopting this training strategy, the accuracy can be boosted by 12.07% and 7.01% on average in indoor and outdoor environments, respectively. The proposed method is ready to adopt to existing deep learning frameworks of Massive MIMO CSI feedback. Codes of JPTS are available on GitHub for reproducibility.

CQNet: Complex Input Quantized Neural Network designed for Massive MIMO CSI Feedback

The Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system is a core technology of the next generation communication. With the growing complexity of CSI in massive MIMO system, traditional compressive sensing based CSI feedback has become a bottleneck problem that is limited in piratical. Recently, numerous deep learning based CSI feedback approaches demonstrate the efficiency and potential. However, the existing methods lack a reasonable interpretation of the deep learning model and the accuracy of the model decreases significantly as the CSI compression rate increases. In this paper, from the intrinsic properties of CSI data itself, we devised the corresponding deep learning building blocks to compose a novel neural network CQNet and experiment result shows CQNet outperform the state-of-the-art method with less computational overhead by achieving an average performance improvement of 8.07% in both outdoor and indoor scenarios. In addition, this paper also investigates the reasons for the decrease in model accuracy at large compression rates and proposes a strategy to embed a quantization layer to achieve effective compression, by which the original accuracy loss of 67.19% on average is reduced to 21.96% on average, and the compression rate is increased by 8 times on the original benchmark.