Deep Inertial Navigation using Continuous Domain Adaptation and Optimal Transport

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new strategy for learning inertial robotic navigation models. The proposed strategy enhances the generalisability of end-to-end inertial modelling, and is aimed at wheeled robotic deployments. Concretely, the paper describes the following. (1) Using precision robotics, we empirically characterise the effect of changing the sensor position during navigation on the distribution of raw inertial signals, as well as the corresponding impact on learnt latent spaces. (2) We propose neural architectures and algorithms to assimilate knowledge from an indexed set of sensor positions in order to enhance the robustness and generalisability of robotic inertial tracking in the field. Our scheme of choice uses continuous domain adaptation (DA) and optimal transport (OT). (3) In our evaluation, continuous OT DA outperforms a continuous adversarial DA baseline, while also showing quantifiable learning benefits over simple data augmentation. We will release our dataset to help foster future research.