학술논문

Plug-and-Play Sparse Inertial Motion Tracking With Sim-to-Real Transfer
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Sensors Letters IEEE Sens. Lett. Sensors Letters, IEEE. 7(10):1-4 Oct, 2023
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Robotics and Control Systems
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Signal Processing and Analysis
Kinematics
Magnetometers
Magnetic domains
Fasteners
Motion segmentation
Sensors
Magnetosphere
Sensor signal processing
inertial measurement units (IMUs)
magnetometer-free
recurrent neural networks
sensor fusion
sparse sensing
Language
ISSN
2475-1472
Abstract
Inertial measurement units (IMUs) are used for inertial motion tracking (IMT) in a growing number of applications as sensor fusion methods are being advanced in three directions: magnetometer-free IMT methods that eliminate the effect of magnetic disturbances; sparse IMT approaches that lead to reduced setup complexity; and automatic self-calibration of sensor-to-segment positions or orientations. In this letter, we propose an approach that combines all three achievements and, for the first time, enables plug-and-play, magnetometer-free, and sparse IMT. This is accomplished by training a recurrent neural-network-based observer (RNNo) on just-in-time generated simulated motion data of kinematic chains. We demonstrate that domain-specific training data augmentations lead to a trained RNNo which zero shot generalizes to previously unseen experimental data and, thus, overcomes the sim-to-real gap. The trained RNNo achieves a tracking error of $< 4$ degrees when estimating the relative pose of a three-segment kinematic chain with two hinge joints. The proposed method offers a novel simulation-data-driven approach for solving complex sparse sensing problems while assuring robust and plug-and-play generalizability to experimental data.