R-WhONet: Recalibrated Wheel Odometry Neural Network for Vehicular Positioning using Transfer Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces R-WhONet, a transfer learning framework that recalibrates a neural network for vehicle wheel odometry, significantly improving its ability to generalize across different vehicles and environments during GNSS outages.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel transfer learning approach, R-WhONet, that enhances the generalization of wheel odometry neural networks to new vehicle domains, addressing a key limitation of prior data-driven models.

Findings

R-WhONet improves model generalization to new vehicles by up to 32%.

The approach effectively adapts to different terrains and sensor noise patterns.

Performance remains robust during short-term and long-term GNSS outages.

Abstract

This paper proposes a transfer learning approach to recalibrate our previously developed Wheel Odometry Neural Network (WhONet) for vehicle positioning in environments where Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are unavailable. The WhONet has been shown to possess the capability to learn the uncertainties in the wheel speed measurements needed for correction and accurate positioning of vehicles. These uncertainties may be manifested as tyre pressure changes from driving on muddy and uneven terrains or wheel slips. However, a common cause for concern for data-driven approaches, such as the WhONet model, is usually the inability to generalise the models to a new vehicle. In scenarios where machine learning models are trained in a specific domain but deployed in another domain, the model's performance degrades. In real-life scenarios, several factors are influential to this degradation, from changes to the dynamics of the vehicle to new pattern distributions of the sensor's noise, and bias will make the test sensor data vary from training data. Therefore, the challenge is to explore techniques that allow the trained machine learning models to spontaneously adjust to new vehicle domains. As such, we propose the Recalibrated-Wheel Odometry neural Network (R-WhONet), that adapts the WhONet model from its source domain (a vehicle and environment on which the model is initially trained) to the target domain (a new vehicle on which the trained model is to be deployed). Through a performance evaluation on several GNSS outage scenarios - short-term complex driving scenarios, and on longer-term GNSS outage scenarios. We demonstrate that a model trained in the source domain does not generalise well to a new vehicle in the target domain. However, we show that our new proposed framework improves the generalisation of the WhONet model to new vehicles in the target domains by up to 32%.