Beyond Dead Reckoning: A Point of View on Camera--DAS--GNSS Continuity in Road Tunnels

Lyes Saad Saoud; Hesham A. Rakha; Mona Jaber; Moussa Ayyash

cs.ROSep 13, 2026

Beyond Dead Reckoning: A Point of View on Camera--DAS--GNSS Continuity in Road Tunnels

Authors: Lyes Saad Saoud, Hesham A. Rakha, Mona Jaber, Moussa Ayyash

Organizations: School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, U.K.

Abstract

Road tunnels remove satellite visibility where connected and automated vehicles still require continuous, attributable, and integrity-bounded positioning. This Point of View argues that tunnel localization should be treated as infrastructure-assisted cross-modal track continuity, not as extrapolation from the last trusted satellite fix. A trusted portal satellite solution provides the global anchor, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) continuous motion evidence, cameras sparse identity and lane anchors, onboard sensing short-term dynamics, and edge computing association, fusion, integrity monitoring, and guarded reacquisition. Ground truth is reserved for offline calibration and validation. The article develops a falsifiable research and deployment agenda for progressing from synchronized multimodal evidence to validated, integrity-aware tunnel positioning continuity.

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Jun 18, 2026 · cs.ROJ/K move · Enter open · S save

Route-Constrained Robust Fusion Estimation for MEMS/GNSS Integrated Navigation of Unmanned Ground Vehicles in GNSS Degraded Environments

Jingzhi Cui, Chao Zhang, Yuliang Mao, Shaolin Lü+3

State Key Laboratory of Precision Space-time Information Sensing Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Xiaomi Inc., Beijing, China

To address cumulative localization drift of unmanned ground vehicles in structured road environments under severe Global Navigation Satellite System signal occlusion, this paper proposes a robust route-constrained state estimation method. During periods without satellite signals, the proposed method establishes the correspondence between the historical dead reckoning trajectory and local segments of the mission route extracted from a high-definition map, and estimates a route-referenced position via a two-dimensional rigid transformation. The estimated position is then formulated as a pseudo-position observation and incorporated into an Extended Kalman Filter update. In this way, route constraints at the road level can be continuously injected into a unified state estimation framework, thereby suppressing position deviation relative to the mission route while indirectly improving azimuth estimation. To enhance practical applicability, engineering strategies, such as trigger control, matching quality validation, route offset compensation, and single update correction limiting, are further introduced. Experiments in three representative scenarios, including a long tunnel, a multi-segment tunnel, and a curved tunnel, show that the proposed method effectively suppresses error accumulation during satellite outages, reduces the risk of large maximum deviation, and improves localization continuity and road-level usability.

Global Navigation Satellite System State Estimation Multi-Sensor Fusion

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Abstract

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