Gal Versano

Gal Versano, Itzik Klein

Accurate and robust localization remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous ground vehicles. In this work, we propose a hybrid neural inertial navigation framework that integrates a wheel-mounted inertial sensors, enforced periodic trajectories, and a simple, efficient neural network capable of regressing vehicle displacement with GNSS position updates in an error-state extended Kalman filter. The periodic trajectories increase the inertial signal-to-noise ratio, allowing the network to use only inertial readings to estimate displacement. The approach is validated through real-world experiments using multiple wheel-mounted inertial sensors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a significant improvement in positioning accuracy, reducing the position root mean squared error by approximately 46 % compared to standard wheel-mounted inertial sensor fusion with GNSS updates.

Gal Versano, Itzik Klein

Accurate and reliable navigation is essential for autonomous ground vehicle operations. Standard INS/GNSS fusion relies on GNSS position updates, which provide limited observability of orientation and inertial sensor error states, particularly during low-dynamic motion. In this work, we propose utilizing past GNSS measurements alongside a motion model to extract meaningful vehicle acceleration information. This acceleration measurement is then integrated into the INS/GNSS filter to improve its robustness and accuracy. The proposed approach is evaluated on two real-world unmanned ground vehicle datasets collected from different mobile platforms and inertial sensor grades. Results demonstrate consistent positioning accuracy improvements relative to the standard position-aided filter, with mean position root mean square error improvements of 11.40 % and 20.74 % on the two datasets, respectively.

Dusan Nemec, Gal Versano, Itai Savin et al.

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.

Gal Versano, Itzik Klein

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.

Gal Versano, Itzik Klein

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.