RIDI: robust IMU double integration

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel data-driven approach for inertial navigation, which learns to estimate trajectories of natural human motions just from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) in every smartphone. The key observation is that human motions are repetitive and consist of a few major modes (e.g., standing, walking, or turning). Our algorithm regresses a velocity vector from the history of linear accelerations and angular velocities, then corrects low-frequency bias in the linear accelerations, which are integrated twice to estimate positions. We have acquired training data with ground truth motion trajectories across multiple human subjects and multiple phone placements (e.g., in a bag or a hand). The qualitatively and quantitatively evaluations have demonstrated that our simple algorithm outperforms existing heuristic-based approaches and is even comparable to full Visual Inertial navigation to our surprise. As far as we know, this paper is the first to introduce supervised training for inertial navigation, potentially opening up a new line of research in the domain of data-driven inertial navigation. We will publicly share our code and data to facilitate further research (Project website: https://yanhangpublic.github.io/ridi).