Arup Kumar Sahoo

Arup Kumar Sahoo, Itzik Klein

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.

Shivani Saini, Ramesh Kumar Vats, Arup Kumar Sahoo

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.

Guy Damari, Zeev Yampolsky, Nadav Cohen et al.

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.

Arup Kumar Sahoo, Itzik Klein

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) rely heavily on the fusion of inertial sensors and Doppler velocity logs (DVLs) for navigation. In standard autonomous navigation systems, the DVL measures four beam velocities, thereby enabling the estimation of the AUV velocity vector. However, during real-world missions, the DVL may receive noisy or incomplete beam measurements due to marine obstacles, seabed reflections, or environmental disturbances. Furthermore, some low-cost underwater platforms operate without inertial sensors to reduce system complexity and cost. In such cases, reliable estimation of the AUV velocity vector in real-world missing beam scenarios becomes challenging, leading to degraded navigation solutions. To circumvent these challenges and enable resilient underwater navigation, we propose DVL-DeepONet, a physics-guided deep neural operator framework along with three variants. The proposed models are designed to estimate DVL-based velocity information under multiple operational scenarios, including (i) noise-resilient estimation in coupled inertial/DVL measurements, (ii) DVL-only learning, and (iii) beam measurement recovery. By learning a nonlinear operator that maps temporal inertial/DVL observations directly to vehicle velocity while enforcing DVL measurement physics through a consistency constraint, the proposed approach enables robust velocity estimation even under degraded sensing conditions. The proposed framework is validated using real-world AUV experiments, comprising a cumulative path length of approximately 10,000 m. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DVL-DeepONet architectures outperform baseline model-based approaches and learning-based algorithms by 40%.

Arup Kumar Sahoo, Itzik Klein

A fundamental requirement for full autonomy in mobile robots is accurate navigation even in situations where satellite navigation or cameras are unavailable. In such practical situations, relying only on inertial sensors will result in navigation solution drift due to the sensors' inherent noise and error terms. One of the emerging solutions to mitigate drift is to maneuver the robot in a snake-like slithering motion to increase the inertial signal-to-noise ratio, allowing the regression of the mobile robot position. In this work, we propose MoRPI-PINN as a physics-informed neural network framework for accurate inertial-based mobile robot navigation. By embedding physical laws and constraints into the training process, MoRPI-PINN is capable of providing an accurate and robust navigation solution. Using real-world experiments, we show accuracy improvements of over 85% compared to other approaches. MoRPI-PINN is a lightweight approach that can be implemented even on edge devices and used in any typical mobile robot application.