Continuous planning for inertial-aided systems

Abstract Inertial-aided systems require continuous motion excitation among other reasons to characterize the measurement biases that will enable accurate integration required for localization frameworks. This paper proposes the use of informative path planning to find the best trajectory for minimizing the uncertainty of IMU biases and an adaptive traces method to guide the planner towards trajectories that aid convergence. The key contribution is a novel regression method based on Gaussian Process (GP) to enforce continuity and differentiability between waypoints from a variant of the $$\hbox {RRT}^*$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msup> <mml:mtext>RRT</mml:mtext> <mml:mo>∗</mml:mo> </mml:msup> </mml:math> planning algorithm. We employ linear operators applied to the GP kernel function to infer not only continuous position trajectories, but also velocities and accelerations. The use of linear functionals enable velocity and acceleration constraints given by the IMU measurements to be imposed on the position GP model. The results from both simulation and real-world experiments show that planning for IMU bias convergence helps minimize localization errors in state estimation frameworks.