SdoNet: Speed Odometry Network and Noise Adapter for Vehicle Integrated Navigation

The emerging applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), such as driverless cars, have an increasing need for precise vehicle positioning. Inertial navigation systems (INSs) became a possible component of autonomous driving systems due to low computational load, fast response, and high autonomy. However, error accumulation presents a significant challenge. Although nonholonomic constraints (NHCs) and odometry (ODO) have been demonstrated to improve INS, NHC is not always reliable, and ODO is often inaccessible in many applications. To address these issues, we propose a novel untethered pseudo-odometry, SdoNet, a convolutional neural network that estimates vehicle velocity from raw inertial measurement unit (IMU) observations to extend NHC as a 3-D velocity constraint without needing a hardware-wheeled ODO. To eliminate the influence of interference features on the accuracy of SdoNet, we improve the SdoNet by incorporating a residual module, attention mechanism, and soft threshold to guide the network to eliminate interference features. Moreover, a lightweight noise adapter network is proposed to adjust the constraint measurement noise covariance dynamically to apply the velocity constraint properly. The proposed approach is validated on the KITTI data set, demonstrating that SdoNet enhances the network's learning ability and achieves robust and accurate velocity regression, especially in noisy IMU observations. The mean absolute speed regression error of SdoNet is lower than the two types of long short-term memory networks by 52.52% and 71.86%, respectively. Compared to the process using only NHC, the absolute translation error is reduced by approximately 44.00% after employing the pseudo-ODO velocity constraint and further reduced by around 11.31% after employing the noise adapter.