No abstract

One of the critical tasks required for fully autonomous functionality is the ability to achieve an accurate navigation solution; that is, to determine the platform position, velocity, and orientation. Various sensors, depending on the vehicle environment (air, sea, or land), are employed to achieve this goal. In parallel to the development of novel navigation and sensor fusion algorithms, machine-learning based algorithms are penetrating into the navigation and sensor fusion fields. An excellent example for this trend is pedestrian dead reckoning, used for indoor navigation, where both classical and machine learning approaches are used to improve the navigation accuracy. To facilitate machine learning algorithms' derivation and validation for autonomous platforms, a huge quantity of recorded sensor data is needed. Unfortunately, in many situations, such datasets are not easy to collect or are not publicly available. To advance the development of accurate autonomous navigation, this paper presents the autonomous platforms inertial dataset. It contains inertial sensor raw data and corresponding ground truth trajectories. The dataset was collected using a variety of platforms including a quadrotor, two autonomous underwater vehicles, a land vehicle, a remote controlled electric car, and a boat. A total of 805.5 minutes of recordings were made using different types of inertial sensors, global navigation satellite system receivers, and Doppler velocity logs. After describing the sensors that were employed for the recordings, a detailed description of the conducted experiments is provided. The autonomous platform inertial dataset is available at: https://github.com/ansfl/Navigation-Data-Project/.

Quadrotor usage is continuously increasing for both civilian and military applications such as surveillance, mapping, and deliveries. Commonly, quadrotors use an inertial navigation system combined with a global navigation satellite systems receiver for outdoor applications and a camera for indoor/outdoor applications. For various reasons, such as lighting conditions or satellite signal blocking, the quadrotor’s navigation solution depends only on the inertial navigation system solution. As a consequence, the navigation solution drifts in time due to errors and noises in the inertial sensor measurements. To handle such situations and bind the solution drift, the quadrotor dead reckoning (QDR) approach utilizes pedestrian dead reckoning principles. To that end, instead of flying the quadrotor in a straight line trajectory, it is flown in a periodic motion, in the vertical plane, to enable peak-to-peak (two local maximum points within the cycle) distance estimation. Although QDR manages to improve the pure inertial navigation solution, it has several shortcomings as it requires calibration before usage, provides only peak-to-peak distance, and does not provide the altitude of the quadrotor. To circumvent these issues, we propose QuadNet, a hybrid framework for quadrotor dead reckoning to estimate the quadrotor’s three-dimensional position vector at any user-defined time rate. As a hybrid approach, QuadNet uses both neural networks and model-based equations during its operation. QuadNet requires only the inertial sensor readings to provide the position vector. Experimental results with DJI’s Matrice 300 quadrotor are provided to show the benefits of using the proposed approach.