A Versatile Keyframe-Based Structureless Filter for Visual Inertial Odometry

Motion estimation by fusing data from at least a camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) enables many applications in robotics. However, among the multitude of Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) methods, few efficiently estimate device motion with consistent covariance, and calibrate sensor parameters online for handling data from consumer sensors. This paper addresses the gap with a Keyframe-based Structureless Filter (KSF). For efficiency, landmarks are not included in the filter's state vector. For robustness, KSF associates feature observations and manages state variables using the concept of keyframes. For flexibility, KSF supports anytime calibration of IMU systematic errors, as well as extrinsic, intrinsic, and temporal parameters of each camera. Estimator consistency and observability of sensor parameters were analyzed by simulation. Sensitivity to design options, e.g., feature matching method and camera count was studied with the EuRoC benchmark. Sensor parameter estimation was evaluated on raw TUM VI sequences and smartphone data. Moreover, pose estimation accuracy was evaluated on EuRoC and TUM VI sequences versus recent VIO methods. These tests confirm that KSF reliably calibrates sensor parameters when the data contain adequate motion, and consistently estimate motion with accuracy rivaling recent VIO methods. Our implementation runs at 42 Hz with stereo camera images on a consumer laptop.

Evolutionary Architecture Search for Graph Neural Networks

Automated machine learning (AutoML) has seen a resurgence in interest with the boom of deep learning over the past decade. In particular, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has seen significant attention throughout the AutoML research community, and has pushed forward the state-of-the-art in a number of neural models to address grid-like data such as texts and images. However, very litter work has been done about Graph Neural Networks (GNN) learning on unstructured network data. Given the huge number of choices and combinations of components such as aggregator and activation function, determining the suitable GNN structure for a specific problem normally necessitates tremendous expert knowledge and laborious trails. In addition, the slight variation of hyper parameters such as learning rate and dropout rate could dramatically hurt the learning capacity of GNN. In this paper, we propose a novel AutoML framework through the evolution of individual models in a large GNN architecture space involving both neural structures and learning parameters. Instead of optimizing only the model structures with fixed parameter settings as existing work, an alternating evolution process is performed between GNN structures and learning parameters to dynamically find the best fit of each other. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce and evaluate evolutionary architecture search for GNN models. Experiments and validations demonstrate that evolutionary NAS is capable of matching existing state-of-the-art reinforcement learning approaches for both the semi-supervised transductive and inductive node representation learning and classification.

Inertial Sensing Meets Artificial Intelligence: Opportunity or Challenge?

The inertial navigation system (INS) has been widely used to provide self-contained and continuous motion estimation in intelligent transportation systems. Recently, the emergence of chip-level inertial sensors has expanded the relevant applications from positioning, navigation, and mobile mapping to location-based services, unmanned systems, and transportation big data. Meanwhile, benefit from the emergence of big data and the improvement of algorithms and computing power, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a consensus tool that has been successfully applied in various fields. This article reviews the research on using AI technology to enhance inertial sensing from various aspects, including sensor design and selection, calibration and error modeling, navigation and motion-sensing algorithms, multi-sensor information fusion, system evaluation, and practical application. Based on the over 30 representative articles selected from the nearly 300 related publications, this article summarizes the state of the art, advantages, and challenges on each aspect. Finally, it summarizes nine advantages and nine challenges of AI-enhanced inertial sensing and then points out future research directions.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL): Another Perspective for Unsupervised Wireless Localization

Location is key to spatialize internet-of-things (IoT) data. However, it is challenging to use low-cost IoT devices for robust unsupervised localization (i.e., localization without training data that have known location labels). Thus, this paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based unsupervised wireless-localization method. The main contributions are as follows. (1) This paper proposes an approach to model a continuous wireless-localization process as a Markov decision process (MDP) and process it within a DRL framework. (2) To alleviate the challenge of obtaining rewards when using unlabeled data (e.g., daily-life crowdsourced data), this paper presents a reward-setting mechanism, which extracts robust landmark data from unlabeled wireless received signal strengths (RSS). (3) To ease requirements for model re-training when using DRL for localization, this paper uses RSS measurements together with agent location to construct DRL inputs. The proposed method was tested by using field testing data from multiple Bluetooth 5 smart ear tags in a pasture. Meanwhile, the experimental verification process reflected the advantages and challenges for using DRL in wireless localization.