cs.ROSep 6, 2026

\textbf{PLATO}: \emph{Preintegration Learning from Accurate Trajectory Observations} for Neural Inertial Odometry

Authors: Haoying Li, Qihang Liu, Yifan Peng, Keyan Miao, Junfeng Wu

Abstract

Neural inertial odometry has demonstrated strong potential for motion estimation in challenging environments, yet inertial-only preintegration remains sensitive to IMU bias and uncertainty. To this end, this paper introduces \textbf{PLATO}:\emph{Preintegration Learning from Accurate Trajectory Observations}, a likelihood-based framework that leverages accurate trajectory observations to jointly learn IMU bias dynamics modeled by a neural ordinary differential equation(NODE) and gyroscope and accelerometer noise covariances. Optimization exploits the sparse structure of the negative log-likelihood, with IMU noise-parameter gradients computed by forward differentiation. A tailored double-adjoint scheme couples a discrete invariant-error adjoint with a continuous-time adjoint for the bias NODE, enabling memory-efficient likelihood optimization over the nested bias-dynamics and IMU-preintegration rollouts. Validation on EuRoC shows improved performance, and underwater robot experiments demonstrate applicability under intermittent lighting failures and visual degradation.

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