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A long-term accurate and robust localization system is essential for mobile robots to operate efficiently outdoors. Recent studies have shown the significant advantages of the wheel-mounted inertial measurement unit (Wheel-IMU)-based dead reckoning system. However, it still drifts over extended periods because of the absence of external correction signals. To achieve the goal of long-term accurate localization, we propose Wheel-GINS, a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)/inertial navigation system (INS) integrated navigation system using a Wheel-IMU. Wheel-GINS fuses the GNSS position measurement with the Wheel-IMU via an extended Kalman filter to limit the long-term error drift and provide continuous state estimation when the GNSS signal is blocked. Considering the specificities of the GNSS/Wheel-IMU integration, we conduct detailed modeling and online estimation of the Wheel-IMU installation parameters, including the Wheel-IMU leverarm and mounting angle and the wheel radius error. Experimental results have shown that Wheel-GINS outperforms the traditional GNSS/Odometer/INS integrated navigation system during GNSS outages. At the same time, Wheel-GINS can effectively estimate the Wheel-IMU installation parameters online and, consequently, improve the localization accuracy and practicality of the system. The source code of our implementation is publicly available (https://github.com/i2Nav-WHU/Wheel-GINS)., Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

Distracted driver activity recognition plays a critical role in risk aversion-particularly beneficial in intelligent transportation systems. However, most existing methods make use of only the video from a single view and the difficulty-inconsistent issue is neglected. Different from them, in this work, we propose a novel MultI-camera Feature Integration (MIFI) approach for 3D distracted driver activity recognition by jointly modeling the data from different camera views and explicitly re-weighting examples based on their degree of difficulty. Our contributions are two-fold: (1) We propose a simple but effective multi-camera feature integration framework and provide three types of feature fusion techniques. (2) To address the difficulty-inconsistent problem in distracted driver activity recognition, a periodic learning method, named example re-weighting that can jointly learn the easy and hard samples, is presented. The experimental results on the 3MDAD dataset demonstrate that the proposed MIFI can consistently boost performance compared to single-view models., Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Minor typos have been fixed in Table IV

A reliable pose estimator robust to environmental disturbances is desirable for mobile robots. To this end, inertial measurement units (IMUs) play an important role because they can perceive the full motion state of the vehicle independently. However, it suffers from accumulative error due to inherent noise and bias instability, especially for low-cost sensors. In our previous studies on Wheel-INS \cite{niu2021, wu2021}, we proposed to limit the error drift of the pure inertial navigation system (INS) by mounting an IMU to the wheel of the robot to take advantage of rotation modulation. However, Wheel-INS still drifted over a long period of time due to the lack of external correction signals. In this letter, we propose to exploit the environmental perception ability of Wheel-INS to achieve simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with only one IMU. To be specific, we use the road bank angles (mirrored by the robot roll angles estimated by Wheel-INS) as terrain features to enable the loop closure with a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter. The road bank angle is sampled and stored according to the robot position in the grid maps maintained by the particles. The weights of the particles are updated according to the difference between the currently estimated roll sequence and the terrain map. Field experiments suggest the feasibility of the idea to perform SLAM in Wheel-INS using the robot roll angle estimates. In addition, the positioning accuracy is improved significantly (more than 30\%) over Wheel-INS. The source code of our implementation is publicly available (https://github.com/i2Nav-WHU/Wheel-SLAM)., Comment: Accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

A reliable self-contained navigation system is essential for autonomous vehicles. Based on our previous study on Wheel-INS \cite{niu2019}, a wheel-mounted inertial measurement unit (Wheel-IMU)-based dead reckoning (DR) system, in this paper, we propose a multiple IMUs-based DR solution for the wheeled robots. The IMUs are mounted at different places of the wheeled vehicles to acquire various dynamic information. In particular, at least one IMU has to be mounted at the wheel to measure the wheel velocity and take advantages of the rotation modulation. The system is implemented through a distributed extended Kalman filter structure where each subsystem (corresponding to each IMU) retains and updates its own states separately. The relative position constraints between the multiple IMUs are exploited to further limit the error drift and improve the system robustness. Particularly, we present the DR systems using dual Wheel-IMUs, one Wheel-IMU plus one vehicle body-mounted IMU (Body-IMU), and dual Wheel-IMUs plus one Body-IMU as examples for analysis and comparison. Field tests illustrate that the proposed multi-IMU DR system outperforms the single Wheel-INS in terms of both positioning and heading accuracy. By comparing with the centralized filter, the proposed distributed filter shows unimportant accuracy degradation while holds significant computation efficiency. Moreover, among the three multi-IMU configurations, the one Body-IMU plus one Wheel-IMU design obtains the minimum drift rate. The position drift rates of the three configurations are 0.82\% (dual Wheel-IMUs), 0.69\% (one Body-IMU plus one Wheel-IMU), and 0.73\% (dual Wheel-IMUs plus one Body-IMU), respectively., Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

A self-contained autonomous dead reckoning (DR) system is desired to complement the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) for land vehicles, for which odometer-aided inertial navigation system (ODO/INS) is a classical solution. In this study, we use a wheel-mounted MEMS IMU (Wheel-IMU) to substitute the odometer, and further, investigate three types of measurement models, including the velocity measurement, displacement increment measurement, and contact point zero-velocity measurement, in the Wheel-IMU based DR system. The measurement produced by the Wheel-IMU along with the non-holonomic constraint (NHC) are fused with INS through an error-state extended Kalman filter (EKF). Theoretical discussion and field tests illustrate the feasibility and equivalence of the three measurements in terms of the overall DR performance. The maximum horizontal position drifts are all less than 2% of the total travelled distance. Additionally, the displacement increment measurement model is less sensitive to the lever arm error between the Wheel-IMU and the wheel center., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1912.07805

To improve the accuracy and robustness of the inertial navigation systems (INS) for wheeled robots without adding additional component cost, we propose Wheel-INS, a complete dead reckoning solution based on a wheel-mounted microelectromechanical system (MEMS) inertial measurement unit (IMU). There are two major advantages by mounting an IMU to the center of a non-steering wheel of the ground vehicle. Firstly, the gyroscope outputs can be used to calculate the wheel speed, so as to replace the traditional odometer to mitigate the error drift of INS. Secondly, with the rotation of the wheel, the constant bias error of the inertial sensor can be canceled to some extent. The installation scheme of the wheel-mounted IMU (Wheel-IMU), the system characteristics, and the dead reckoning error analysis are described. Experimental results show that the maximum position drift of Wheel-INS in the horizontal plane is less than 1.8% of the total traveled distance, reduced by 23% compared to the conventional odometer-aided INS (ODO/INS). In addition, Wheel-INS outperforms ODO/INS because of its inherent immunity to constant bias error of gyroscopes. The source code and experimental datasets used in this paper is made available to the community (https://github.com/i2Nav-WHU/Wheel-INS).